Various theoretical frameworks approach teacher change differently. If teacher candidate supervisors adopt one form of supervision without understanding the assumptions and implications of other models, they risk being too narrow. To help supervisors in their role, an explanation of how a supervisor might intervene from six different perspectives…

The Southwest Educational Development Laboratory produced a three-part series on the initiation of charter schools and their impact on education in the southwestern United States. This booklet marks the last of the series. It describes what early charter-school organizers in New Mexico and Texas proposed doing to create better learning…

Constructivism has received considerable attention in educational scholarship, practitioner preparation, and policy formation. This Digest identifies major forms of constructivism, considering issues and challenges that surface when implementing constructivist approaches to preservice and inservice teacher education. Constructivism is an…

Northeast Louisiana University's Professional Semester began in 1976 to respond to a need for more practical application of what was taught in the required methods courses of the elementary education degree program. It was designed to avoid duplication of generic activities and to let students apply theory and teaching techniques in the classroom.…

Administrative practices used by participants in administrator preparation programs who return to practice are described in this paper. The practices, which extend reflective, intellectual, critical, and participatory concepts into action models, include restructured educational assessment, peer coaching, and professional development. All are…

The notion of the "everyday problematic" (Smith 1987) is used to examine the experiences of three doctoral students engaged in research about leadership for women, with a focus on leadership discourse, feminist perspectives, and organizational change. "Everyday problematic" refers to the discrepancy between what is defined as leadership and what…

A study analyzed the discourse and content of a staff development process designed to introduce research-based understandings of reading comprehension into teachers' thinking and practices. Thirty-nine fourth-, fifth-, and sixth-grade teachers in the Southwest participated in videotaped staff development workshops. Results indicated that creating…

Reflective practice is a mode that integrates thought and action with reflection. Learning is dependent upon the integration of experience with reflection and of theory with practice. Experience is a basis for learning but reflection is the essential part of the learning process because it results in making sense or extracting meaning from the…

This article presents an interview with Don Holdaway, early childhood educator and originator of "shared book experience." The article first provides a brief summary of themes embodied in Holdaway's first book, "The Foundations of Literacy." It then presents the interview with Holdaway, discussing literacy learning, big books,…

A magazine writer and university instructor used interview samples, editors' comments, and other materials from his own article-then-in-progress for the "New York Times Magazine" in a university-level class in magazine writing. Students, who were creating their own in-depth magazine articles, could see the same principles and techniques…

Noting the importance of whole concept learning as opposed to fragmented non-meaningful facts, this paper presents a unit of study on animal habitats that is geared for a first-grade whole-language classroom in the later stages of the year. The major objective of the unit presented in the paper is for students to be able to identify the habitats…

An educational administrator program designed to diversify responsibility, integrate the theory-practice relationship, and develop leadership is described in this report. The first section discusses three theoretical perspectives, which are characterized by shared leadership, a collective purpose, conflict, and the constituency of the whole. The…

Theories of creative writing have been for the most part bound up with theories of art. Both teachers and the general public, however, are dissatisfied with such institutionalized theories. Creative writers should first look to theories of writing rather than infer them from art. Recent composition theories, both cognitive theories and those of…

Observing that basal readers and standardized testing lead teachers to focus on facts when dealing with novels or poetry in class, this monograph discusses research on response to literature. The monograph also presents classroom activities designed to allow students to explore the forms, the language, and the imagery of fiction, poetry, and…

Concerning curriculum making, it is impossible to integrate the different meanings of "curriculum" into a single formula. Read as social constructions, different conceptions reflect varying educational, social-political, and historical contexts. This paper explores how these contexts, or multiple realities, evolved historically and how…