Developing positive school climates and improving school discipline policies and practices are critical steps to raising academic achievement and supporting student success. However, there is no single formula for doing so. Rather, the growing body of research and best practices in the field should inform locally developed approaches to improving…

The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA or the Recovery Act) of 2009 provided an unprecedented level of funding for K-12 education. The program created a "historic opportunity to save hundreds of thousands of jobs, support states and school districts, and advance reforms and improvements that will create long-lasting results for our…

Background: Teaching sexuality education to support young people's sexual development and overall sexual health is both needed and supported. Data continue to highlight the high rates of teen pregnancy, sexually transmitted disease, including human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) infections, among young people in the United States as well as the…

The Developmental Democratic Planning (DDP) model frames educational planning as a process that extends beyond the immediate focus of a particular planning effort to acknowledge and cultivate the potential of all members of the organization to fulfill their roles as active participants in the democratic life of the organization. The DDP model…

The research reported in this article follows-up on a study conducted by Anast-May, Buckner, and Geer (2010). The 47 interviewed principals identified three types of experiences school leadership interns needed in order to prepare them to lead school improvement efforts. This study explores interns' perspectives on the efficacy of their…

This article reports on a program of research that examined the background, planning, implementation, and evaluation of an after-school preventive intervention program within an ongoing urban alternative education program targeting African American students referred to the school because of their problematic behavior in regular schools. The…

Coalition government policies have put into question the role of local authorities in a "self-improving school system". In a number of local authorities new authority-wide partnership bodies are being set up involving all local schools, including academies, and controlled by headteachers. This article begins with an analysis of the new…

Eleven experienced community college faculty members were interviewed to elicit examples of how they improved student learning productivity in their online courses. The 11 faculty members represented eight different states, nine different fields or disciplines, and all were permanent or full-time faculty members at community colleges in the…

This paper explores the adoption of the scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL) by 10 Malaysian university academics. SoTL was part of a pioneering sector-wide initiative for improving teaching and learning. The qualitative study showed that there had been no true learning phase for SoTL because academics had high expectations of rapid success…

Similar to Dickens's "Tale of Two Cities", this research study is about a tale of two schools. The first type of school is a dysfunctional school. Dysfunctional schools are schools in a state of chaos (Shipengrower & Conway, 1998). The second school is that of order. The researchers refer to this school as a functional school.…

Today's American educational context is characterised by increasing standardisation coupled with heightened accountability. While some view standardisation as a lever for equity, many view it as problematic for the work of teachers. Efforts to improve student achievement by focusing on the activities of teachers have resulted in an…

The concept of the professional learning community (PLC) has been embraced widely in schools as a means for teachers to engage in professional development leading to enhanced pupil learning. However, the term has become so ubiquitous it is in danger of losing all meaning, or worse, of reifying "teacher learning" within a narrowly defined…

The New South Wales (NSW) Government Department of Education and Communities and the Singapore Ministry of Education have encouraged teachers to engage in practitioner research as part of their professional learning agenda because it is perceived as a powerful means of investigating and improving educational practice. Drawing on a Schatzkian…

This chapter explores whether a new learning space, designed to be more like a café than a classroom, provides an environment that facilitates active and collaborative learning.

In this article the author describes a discussion he had with a group of colleagues on designing alternative forms of academic development. In this discussion their creativity was curtailed and the range of alternatives restricted, because they thought academic development was restricted to offering opportunities for development to academics. As a…