When a company name means "giving life," the bar for learning and development programs is held high. In this article, the author describes what it takes to graduate from DaVita Academy, the soft skills training program dialysis services company DaVita offers all its employees. DaVita's chief executive officer, Kent Thiry, states that the Academy…

In the past, the learning management system (LMS) was a fairly simple program. Its job was to connect an instructor to a student for an individual course. The student could track grades without harassing the faculty member, and the professor could stop worrying about the prospect of losing a student's paper-based assignment. Often, the LMS…

Secondary schools use a variety of methods to assess students' learning. In particular, writing assignments are not only among the most widely utilized type of evaluation but also are one of the most important for future success in post-secondary school environments. The present analysis utilizes the McCallie School Caldwell Writing Center as a…

If a district head or state superintendent wanted to intensify the focus of his curriculum on 21st century skills, he would do well to pay a visit to Tucson's Catalina Foothills School District (CFSD). There on the Arizona city's northeastern edge, educators and administrators have decided to go all in on 21st century skills, and in so doing have…

A set of outreach activities implemented by the College of Engineering of the Public University of Navarra, Spain, is described. They represent different initiatives aimed to improve recruitment of young engineers in the difficult context of declining interest in engineering and the educational changes Europe is facing nowadays. The initiatives…

This article outlines the stress-strain-coping-support (SSCS) model which underpins the whole programme of work described in this supplement. The need for such a model is explained: previous models of substance misuse and the family have attributed dysfunction or deficiency to families or family members. In contrast, the SSCS model assumes that…

In 2004, Central Community College (CCC) established the Mechatronics Education Center (MEC), a regional center of excellence, to help the state address the shortage of skilled technicians in the area of industrial automation. The MEC addresses the needs of the current and future workforce through the implementation of its three main components:…

This article contains a teaching module on copyright compliance for higher education for faculty, staff, and administrators. The training class discusses fair use and its four factors. Those factors include purpose and characters of use, nature of the work, quantity to be borrowed, marketability of the work.

New communication technologies, including personal response "clickers," have become increasingly popular across college campuses as a way to promote a wide range of practices. This paper calls attention to the need for communication models that account for the usefulness of these new technologies, especially as they relate to health promotion,…

In this paper, the development of educational policy and curricula in relation to the development of a multicultural society in Iceland are critically discussed. Neither policy nor national curriculum guides refer particularly to multicultural society, multicultural or intercultural education. Implementations of equity principles are not clear in…

Juvenile awareness programs like Scared Straight became popular crime prevention strategies during the 1970s. Juvenile offenders and at-risk youth who participate in these programs are taken to prisons where inmates use confrontational methods to recount stories about violence, sex, and abuse perpetrated by fellow inmates while living a life…

Ten years of advocacy targeted at establishing a statewide residential school of mathematics and science offers valuable lessons. These lessons learned from one advocacy journey can be applied to other advocacy efforts and generalized beyond this particular example. Therefore, this article provides more than a description of one advocacy story.…

Based on feedback from attendees at an environmental summit who requested information about regional water sources, a team comprised of a local nonprofit, a state university, and a cooperative extension office created a community water education program. Undergraduate student interns worked with the author to develop a 20-minute science-based…

This article describes how a school district's use of a transparent tool coalesced support for systemic improvement. The author was looking for a way to push improvement in his 4,000-student school system when he discovered the balanced scorecard, a strategic tool for performance management. The author details how the balanced scorecard helped him…

This article reports a qualitative investigation of the perceptions on cross-community music education activities of 14 key practitioners with experience with the two main communities in Northern Ireland (NI), Protestant and Catholic. The segregation of the NI education system is outlined in the first section, which is followed by a review of…