Describes the Japan-Florida Teens Meet Project, an international program linking students at a Florida high school and a Japanese high school. Students were encouraged to e-mail their partners daily. The program also involved videoconferencing, a dollar/yen conversion exercise, and construction of space-station scale models. (MLH)

Discusses five lasting 20th-century education reforms: ability grouping, testing, district/school consolidation, vocational education, and specialization. The future seems aimed at personalized instruction, smaller schools, less differentiation between academic and vocational education, greater trust in local governance units, and philosophic…

More people live for weekends and vacations than for the daily work of chosen careers. When students work, they more easily understand that learning adds value to life. Formal schooling must become a time for exploring, experimenting, and constructing a direction for their future lives. (MLH)

Grade retention is ineffective. It is often imposed for nonacademic reasons, fails to improve academic achievement, and exacerbates the dropout problem. Social promotion is equally ineffective at providing appropriate instruction for low-performing students. Feasible alternatives include group problem solving, personalized instruction, and…

Two types of personalized instruction, interaction and thoughtfulness, transcend the behavioral paradigm to include experiences building on individual student differences. Teachers can facilitate learners' progress from cognitive skill development to mastery and real-life problem solving by stressing experiential and inquiry learning, independent…

Advisement is a key component of personalized education. Usually, teacher advisors remain with a small group of advisees while they attend a particular school. The anonymity of large schools can be mitigated by creating school learning communities and/or schools-within-schools. Successful examples are profiled. (15 references) (MLH)

Schools must facilitate all students' efforts to satisfy genetically programmed basic needs for survival, belonging, power, freedom, and fun. A school's culture is found in its artifacts and daily rituals. In a school committed to advisement and advocacy, caring is an obvious cultural symbol. (Contains 11 references.) (MLH)

Personalized instruction focuses specifically on each learner's needs, talents, learning style, interests, and academic background and challenges each learner to progress from one stage to another. This article presents a four-phase continuum of personalized teaching strategies, ranging from behavioral approaches (reinforcement and feedback)…

Reviews personalized instruction models, highlighting contributions of DPIE (diagnosis, prescription, implementation, and evaluation), continuous-progress education, the open-school movement, portfolio assessment, cognitive apprenticeships, and Levin's Accelerated Learning program. All these models profile learning characteristics and promote…

Reviews the history of nongraded high schools, from Preston Search's pioneering efforts in Pueblo, Colorado, to early 1900s Dalton and Winnetka Plans and midcentury continuous-progress plans. Competency, not age, already determines participation in band, orchestra, choir, and athletics. Curricula should be based on the structure, methodology, and…

Three Oaks Elementary School in Fort Myers, Florida, was the first school to adopt Core Knowledge, an articulated K-6 curriculum promoted by E.D. Hirsch, author of "Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know" (1987). Hirsch feels that emphasizing skills over knowledge unintentionally injures disadvantaged students. Program specifics and…

The charter-school movement has captured the imagination of politicians, parents, business leaders, and educators. Despite their many benefits and emphasis on performance accountability, charter schools are not accessible to all students equally. In lieu of charters and magnets, expanding options within existing schools might preserve harmony…

Current efforts to identify content and curriculum standards overlook individual students' needs. Visionary standards and benchmarks serve only to establish targets for learning. The companion variables of student interest and background, learning styles, instructional methods, and learning time must also be addressed. All demand a personalized…

Discusses what individual schools and teachers can do to examine their practices systematically while linking improvements to school improvement efforts at district and state levels. Action research is a refinement of the process every teacher goes through while trying to improve. Improving the education process teacher by teacher seems society's…

Examines how the principal's (metaphorical) role has changed since the 1920s. If the pattern of previous decades holds, the metaphor for the 1990s will merge the principal as facilitator with the principal as instructional leader (the 1980s metaphor). The influence of total quality management applications, performance domains, and preparation…