Change in education is inevitable. Physical educators are being positioned to effectively manage change and control their own destiny. In order to manage and facilitate positive change, physical educators should clearly embrace and accept physical education as a public health tool, understand the educational change process in schools, and know how…

Teacher education programs and school reform efforts are two mechanisms by which research-based reform messages reach thousands of teachers. Prior research has noted, however, that these messages are often in conflict with longstanding beliefs and norms at school sites. This paper examines teacher agency in the context of school of structure and…

Discover how education innovations can produce astonishing results in student success both in and out of school. The educators featured in this book were motivated by the conviction that even the best status quo education was not serving current student needs. They responded with radical changes that tap into recent ideas about educational…

This brief offers lessons learned from California State University teacher preparation programs engaged in using data to inform improvement efforts. The authors consider teacher preparation programs as systems that can undergo continuous, data-driven improvement through an improvement science approach. Teacher preparation programs typically have…

This paper presents states and districts with guidelines and recommendations for improving systems that support instructional practices. Because the quality of teaching is the most important school-based factor for student learning, a focus on instruction is essential for turning around struggling schools and districts and cultivating conditions…

The objective of this article is to provide background on types of goals, a system for writing goals, and a framework for goal-prioritization that can be implemented in classroom and/or sport settings. Goal-setting is the process of developing a desired outcome to serve as the purpose of one's actions.

This chapter argues that the first year of college needs to be reconsidered. The authors offer, as an alternative, a new kind of course, one created by groups of faculty members from different campuses, multidisciplinary in focus, delivered in a blended format, focused on civic outcomes, and intended primarily for first-year students.

Around the world, children who grow up in poverty and children who grow up in middle-class homes rarely have opportunities to get to know one another. Tapori is a friendship network that seeks to make connections between disparate groups of children possible. Its newsletter shares true stories from the point of view of children living in…

During the last 25 years, there have been many calls for new engineering competencies and a corresponding gradual change in both curriculum and pedagogy in engineering education. This has been a global trend, in the US, Europe, Australia and now emerging in the rest of the world. Basically, there have been two main types of societal challenges…

Many students in our school system are being forced out of the classroom due to harsh discipline policies focused on rules rather than the child and the contextualized infraction. These policies punish them by taking away the very thing that could possibly change their lives, their education. The way we deal with behavior issues in the classroom…

The declining number of Technology and Engineering (T&E) educators and teacher preparation programs across the country has been identified as a critical issue plaguing the field for many years (Daugherty, 1998; Volk, 1993). Unfortunately, this issue continues to progress and has raised concerns. Why should middle and high school T&E…

This study describes how a group of teachers in a US public school developed and used permission-seeking moves as strategic and agentic tools to change their school curriculum and challenge norms of teaching. Although the notion of asking permission is typically considered disempowering in educational contexts, this study demonstrates that certain…

While urban charter schools are achieving impressive gains, can charter schools improve outcomes for rural America? This topic is an important one with more than 11 million students attending rural schools and facing lower college enrollment than their urban peers. The National Charter School Resource Center (NCSRC) presents "Harvesting…

To what extent can heads use an inclusive values-led approach to school development in the face of pressures from Ofsted and their Local Authority to focus almost exclusively on attainment outcomes? We explore leadership of school improvement in a qualitative study of 10 head teachers in the English county of "Preshire," who worked with…

This article investigates strategies for internationalisation at technical universities in the Nordic countries. The study explores the institutional rationales for internationalisation, the stories told in the strategy documents, the importance of leaders, faculty, administration and students for implementation of the strategy, and barriers and…