Recent research is revealing a great deal about how changes in educational practices and policies can revamp classrooms and schools to close the achievement gaps and promote excellence in learning for all students. This working paper examines best practices that shift classroom management's emphasis from controlling students' behavior to creating "learning-centered" classrooms that foster their engagement, autonomy, and sense of community by giving them progressively more responsibility, under the teacher's careful guidance. These practices are part of an instruction strategy aimed at helping students achieve high academic, moral, and social goals. The report illustrates the implementation of changes in learning goals, classroom environments, management strategies, and assessment practices through the experiences of "Bill," a science and social studies teacher in an urban middle school, and "Patricia," a teacher in an elementary school on the border between city and suburb. (Contains 4 tables.)