As teachers, our most important mission is to turn our students into readers. It sounds so simple, but it's hard work, and we're all on a deadline. Kittle describes a class in which her own expectations that students would become readers combined with a few impassioned strategies succeeded ... at least with a young man named Alan.

The author explores how the use of joke books can promote fluency in young readers. One young girl's fluency improved measurably, and her engagement and motivation to read the particular kind of text involved played a significant role. (Contains 2 tables.)

During the author's first decade in school administration, coupled with his work with the National Association of Elementary School Principals' National Principal Mentoring Certification Program, he has collected a few nuggets worth sharing to rookie principals. In this article, he discusses what he calls his 7UP (Seven Unyielding Principles): (1)…

This article reports a study designed to identify the factors that both hiring bodies and applicants believe are most important when making decisions about principal selection, appointment and acceptance. Based on a quantitative study involving the four main groups of players in the principal selection process, we confirmed a four-factor…

Purpose: This article examines the age-related management techniques used by older workers in their search for employment. Design and Methods: Data are drawn from interviews with individuals aged 45-65 years (N = 30). Results: Findings indicate that participants develop "counteractions" and "concealments" to manage perceived age discrimination.…

Intriguingly, at a time when the ELT market is inundated with state-of-the-art coursebooks teaching modern-day English, a 30-year-old series enjoys continuing popularity in some secondary schools in Hungary. Why would teachers, several of whom are school-based teacher-mentors in the vanguard of the profession, purposefully choose materials which…

Minority groups should be accurately presented in educational materials for all school children, especially those with minority backgrounds. Materials should avoid giving the minority child a negative self-image. Life should be portrayed as it is, including harsh realities. Factual material must reflect authoritative, comprehensive, and current…

One of the hardest administrative duties for teacher-librarians seems to be collection development. One would think that the selection of books would be effortless, especially with the number of online bookstores offering used book discounts or free shipping for large orders. Deepening budget cuts and limited or untrained staff means collection…

Passages from three selected samples of textbooks are used to show what requirements are made of textbooks in the social sciences. Some hints are given to the teacher for converting reading suggestions into instructional material. Short texts from Karl Marx are also suggested. (Text is in German.) (IFS/WGA)

Selection Research Incorporated (SRI) assisted in the selection of teachers for two school districts in Polk County, Iowa by analyzing audiotaped interviews with the top three or four candidates for each position and matching the candidates with previously prepared profiles of the school districts. Candidates were labeled highly recommended,…

This report is presented with the hope that an account of one group's experience will suggest some useful procedures and will encourage academic librarians to press for a voice in the selection of the administrator with whom they will work. (4 references) (Author/SJ)

We review the nature of conditioned reinforcement, including evidence that conditioned reinforcers maintain choice behavior in concurrent schedules and that they elevate responding in the terminal links of concurrent-chains schedules. A question has resurfaced recently: Do theories of choice in concurrent-chains schedules need to include a term…

The visual system uses several tools to select only the most relevant visual information for further processing, including selection by location. In the present study, the authors explored how many locations can be selected at once. Although past evidence from several visual tasks suggests that the visual system can operate on a fixed number of 4…

Principal selection procedures have been well documented and their components widely described. Interviews are the tools of choice for selecting principals. Besides using information collected apart from the context of interviews to assist with making selection decisions, data obtained from elements that are carefully planned and included within…

The ASC model of choice and confidence in general knowledge proposes that respondents first Assess the familiarity of presented options, and then use the high-familiarity option as a retrieval cue to Search memory for the purposes of Constructing an explanation about why that high-familiarity option is true. The ASC process implies that…