This self-study explores an educational policy-making project initiated, facilitated, and implemented by direct stake-holders through a deliberative, intentional process involving teacher educators, policy-makers, and state regulators. As such, it serves as an example of a high-stakes political change process using principles of deliberative…

Prior research suggests that partnerships in early care and education have the potential to enhance the quality of care and offer comprehensive services to more children and families. This brief draws on data from the national descriptive study of Early Head Start-Child Care (EHS-CC) Partnerships to describe the activities partnerships engage in…

Federal law stresses shared accountability between schools and parents for high student achievement. Yet, there is minimal regulation regarding what parental engagement programs must actually look like. As a result many school districts fail to consider nontraditional constructs of parental engagement that honor the available cultural capital,…

The purpose of this book is to examine the tensions, gaps, and intersections between the practices of leadership in educational systems, school leadership preparation programs, and the often different worlds of academia and k12 schools. Voices from both academia and k12 schools are used to illustrate the tensions that cluster around capacity,…

This article discusses techniques for organizing large classes to allow smooth transitions from whole-class discussions to individual and group work. Topics discussed include how to form groups, keeping track of groups, using colors to organize students, setting expectations, and establishing consequences.

This article explores leadership practice and change as evidenced in multiple data sources gathered during a self-study implementation of a teaching performance assessment. It offers promising models of distributed leadership and organizational change that can inform future program implementers and the field in general. Our experiences suggest…

While working on her master's degree, the author signed up for a summer course that was vaguely titled Teaching Strategies for Secondary School. As it turned out, the professor had significant leeway in deciding what to teach in this one-week course, and he decided to team up with a political science professor to focus on democracy in education.…

The "Quality Practice Project" (QPP) is the National Association of Charter School Authorizers' (NACSA's) multi-year research initiative to identify what high-performing authorizers do to achieve stellar student and public interest outcomes. Participants and researchers collaboratively investigated the perspectives and practices of…

A professional learning community (PLC) is one of the most promising strategies for effecting change in educational practices to improve academic achievement and wellbeing for all students. The PLC facilitator's role in developing and leading blended (online and face-to-face) PLCs with members from Ontario's school districts was examined through a…

The rigidity of teachers unions has been given as a primary reason for their lack of representation among America's rapidly growing, although still relatively small, charter school sector. In the case of post-Hurricane Katrina New Orleans, the city rapidly converted from a union-backed teacher workforce to a largely nonunionized charter school…

Casual and sessional academic staff have traditionally been on the margins of institutional life despite the expansion of this cohort across the university sector. This paper details a project to address this lack of recognition through a workforce strategy to engage, support and effectively manage this often neglected cohort of the academic…

Our case study examined and assessed the quality and effectiveness of information literacy training employed by teacher trainees in their follow-on research process. A sample of teacher trainees enrolled in selected Malaysian Teacher Education Institutes located in the northern region of Malaysia was surveyed. These Institutes' mission is to…

The current research aims at clarifying how school-based management (SBM) can contribute to achieve the decision-making quality in Egyptian general secondary schools and determine the requirements of quality decision-making. It depends on the descriptive method in order to acknowledge the basics of the SBM and its relationship with the quality of…

The authors in this special issue on systems-level consultation provide an excellent range of models for how school psychologists can work as system-level consultants within the various communities they serve. This article (a) provides commentary on the four articles in this special issue focused on systems-level consultation to serve diverse…

Faulty group processes have harmful effects on performance but there is little research about intervention protocols to pre-empt them in higher education. This naturalistic experiment compared a control cohort with an inducted cohort. The inducted cohort attended a workshop, consultations, elected a leader and used tools (a group log and group…