This textbook explores ways in which to teach young adolescents successfully and is based on the premise that curriculum and teaching methods should be designed to create a challenging environment. A developmental view of the young adolescent is presented and is connected to middle level curriculum development; information on content rationales is…

A study was conducted to examine the perspective of planned change as a conscious, deliberate effort to improve systematic operations and to explore assumptions implicit in theory and literature regarding readiness for change. Entry data were collected at orientation and planning workshops for 42 League of Professional Schools teams from Georgia…

Information for planners, administrators, and advocates on the promotion of comprehensive services for preschool handicapped children is presented in seven papers. The first chapter, "The Process of Change" (G. Lambour, Ed., et al.) discusses steps for institutionalizing educational innovations and is based on four meetings of the…

This volume documents the response to the final report of the National Commission on Excellence in Education, "A Nation at Risk," at national, state, and local levels during calendar 1983. It is divided into three parts. The first part, "The Nation Responds: An Overview," describes national developments in education during this…

Developed by Japanese corporations to improve productivity and product quality, quality circles (QC's) are small, voluntary groups of workers who share common job responsibilities and who meet regularly to generate solutions to problems. Features of QC's that are applicable to schools are examined in the nine articles summarized in this annotated…

Findings are presented of research on 902 student teaching programs. The research study focused on: (1) administration of student teaching programs; (2) selected aspects regarding the student teachers themselves; and (3) selected aspects of cooperating teachers and school districts. A prefatory abstract presents a discussion of the objectives of…

Prepared as part of a series applying recent research in oral and written communication instruction to classroom practice, this booklet provides a framework for successful inservice education in communication skills. The first section addresses the question of why teachers need inservice in oral and written communication by pointing to the lack of…

Expectations surrounding the role of e-learning need to be tempered by an awareness of the variety of technical, institutional, social and economic constraints on the innovation process. This paper reports on a case study of the introduction into a university of one of the most central e-learning initiatives in higher education, an enterprise-wide…

To evaluate the approach to improving instruction espoused by the National Writing Project (NWP), this research report examines the assumptions, practices, and impacts of the NWP program to train teachers to teach writing. Following a brief description of the NWP model and its underlying assumptions, the report compares the goals, strategies, and…

This conference proceedings includes the text of 15 of the 27 presentations made at the third annual Conference on Undergraduate Teaching of Psychology. In addition to a conference program, the proceedings includes the following papers: (1) "Multiethnic, Crosscultural Illustrations for Psychology Courses," by Judith Gray; (2) "A Computerized…

This early childhood curriculum study focused on the practical understandings that teachers held about their classroom experiences, as a way of gaining access to the dynamics of curriculum implementation and innovation. Two problems were addressed: (1) the lack of knowledge about the dynamics of curriculum implementation in settings where early…

A special 6-week program, designed to increase the scores of low achieving minority eighth-grade students on the ninth grade Texas Education Assessment of Minimum Skills (TEAMS) Test, was implemented in 1986 in the Houston Independent School District as "Summer Academies." The students, who voluntarily enrolled in the program, were…

A seminar was held in Reykjavik, Iceland for the purposes of disseminating results of the Council of Europe's Council for Cultural Cooperation's (CDCC) Project 8, Innovation in Primary Education (IPE), and exploring issues in educational reform in Iceland, particularly the revision of the core curriculum. Participants were civil servants of the…

Using a Title VI Grant from the U.S. Department of Education, one faculty member at Valencia Community College (VCC) developed international or intercultural modules for existing courses to explore both Western and non-Western contributions to the humanities. During the first year of grant implementation, a module on Jewish and Islamic…

A study determined whether instruction on story elements within rich contexts can increase students' understanding of the characters' traits and motives, their comprehension of stories, and their ability to write causally coherent stories. Instruction was organized around an "anchor" (a story rich with embedded information presented on…