In early November 2013, the authors started talking about visiting the Hurley School, a dual-language school in Boston, Massachusetts. The Hurley School had spent considerable time transitioning to the Common Core State Standards on literacy, but little time addressing the shifts in math. They worried that math classes were no longer rigorous…

Teachers, curriculum experts, and other educators work together using online tools developed by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to create high-quality, useful lessons and research-based instructional tools incorporating the Common Core State Standards.

The math problem is common to most U.S. school districts, and education leaders are well aware that U.S. math achievement lags far behind many other countries in the world. University Place (Washington) School District Superintendent Patti Banks found the conspicuous income gap for math scores even more disturbing. In her school district, only 23%…

The National Staff Development Council (NSDC) has won recognition for the field of professional development. Researchers and education change agents acknowledge the importance of professional learning among strategies essential for reforming schools and raising teacher and student performance. The federal government, states, and school districts…

Types of changes being recommended by various national educational reports were compared with actual changes reported in a national sample of high schools. Implications for staff developers are offered. (DF)

Guidelines are given for training teachers to use computers, based on staff development experiences with the Hampshire (Massachusetts) Educational Collaborative's computer literacy program. Topics covered include training goals, course scheduling, staffing, participant needs, educational strategies, and evaluation. (PP)

Staff developers training teachers to use computers should design learning experiences that encourage teachers to reflect on the learning process itself. These reflections will help them understand how their students learn new material and solve problems. LOGO is a particularly appropriate tool for this purpose. (PP)

The processes of staff development, instructional supervision, and teacher evaluation complement and support each other. The connections between and among them are discussed. Recommendations for implementing an integrated system of instructional improvement are made. (Author/MT)

A model of the inservice training of classroom teachers for mainstreaming handicapped children is presented. The materials used in the program provide information about handicapping conditions as well as curriculum and behavior management styles. (JN)

The central purpose of mainstreaming is to integrate handicapped students with nonhandicapped peers. It is the teacher's responsibility to foster positive and constructive interactions between handicapped students and their peers. Three ways of organizing constructive peer interaction are: (1) cooperation; (2) competition; and (3) an…

A Teacher Corps project conducted by the Edgewood Independent School District and Trinity University (San Antonio, Texas) is described. A classroom teacher at each participating school is trained to lead professional development activities at his or her school. Teacher involvement in designing professional development at each school is emphasized.…

Procedures used by the Eugene (Oregon) Public Schools to train staff members as organizational development specialists are described. School employees volunteer time to work as internal consultants, using organizational management concepts to help colleagues in the school system improve their organizational capabilities, interact effectively,…

This article describes a three-year program for training elementary and secondary school teachers to become staff development specialists, conducted by the New York City Teacher Centers Consortium. The program's history is traced, selected training activities are described, and conclusions about the program's adaptability elsewhere are drawn. (PP)

"Workparties," sponsored by the Teachers Centers' Exchange (Far West Laboratory), provide the time, support, resources, warmth, concreteness, and thought that productive meetings consist of. Descriptions of workparties planned for participants interested in staff development are provided. (CJ)

Three staff development evaluation techniques are presented as alternatives to satisfaction questionnaires. The techniques--stages of concern, levels of use, and component assessment-- underscore the ideas that: (1) New teaching skills will be used in the classroom; (2) Finding out about classroom practices requires individual interaction with…