A growing number of educators are focusing their efforts on improving the work environment of teaching. In place of the typical school's norms and practices that isolate teachers from one another, collaborative schools have norms that encourage teachers and principals to cooperate for school improvement. Such schools are characterized by frequent…

Effective schools have staffs that stress the importance of educational goals and have a well-defined mission. They also clearly communicate the expectation that all students can and will reach the stated goals. Reviews of studies of exemplary schools find that the principals express high expectations for both teacher and student performance,…

The Education for All Handicapped Children Act of 1975 requires mainstreaming, or the education of handicapped children with regular students, to the greatest extent appropriate. Although the provisions of the law call for each student to be assessed individually and provided with an Individualized Education Program (IEP), the costs associated…

Despite a history of conflicting research on its reliability and validity, student evaluation of faculty (SEF) has typically not been viewed as an infringement on academic freedom; it has generally been taken for granted that SEF is appropriate and necessary. However, informal and reasoned analyses of the issue indicate that because SEF is used…

The report includes three papers on the exceptional bilingual child and summaries of 22 bilingual/bicultural special education federally funded training programs. The first paper "Bilingual Special Education Report" by P. Landurand describes Massachusetts' Bilingual Special Education Project (BISEP) which has cooperated with regional education…

The book is intended for use by school- and nonschool-based professionals in teaching social skills and social competence to handicapped persons in order to promote employment success. It provides guidelines, procedures, and instrumentation for: (1) assessing client status on socially validated social skills required in both school- and…

Designed to tap the rich collection of instructional techniques in the ERIC database, this compilation of lesson plans offers practical suggestions for developing high school students' writing skills. The 37 lesson plans in this book are divided into four sections: (1) descriptive; (2) audience/voice; (3) expository; and (4) creative. A user's…

This digest examines the community college's role in helping to fill the current and projected shortage of public school teachers due to increases in the number of teachers retiring and students enrolling. Teacher shortages are most evident in both urban and rural school districts and in the fields of science, mathematics and technology. The…

Parents have the wonderful opportunity and responsibility for nurturing children. This digest presents resources that will enable parents to fulfill their responsibility for developing their children's abilities to do mathematics, while at the same time encouraging more positive attitudes towards mathematics. The resources are divided into three…

Tech prep was created to serve high school students in the two middle quartiles who neither prepare for further study nor gain adequate technical workplace skills by blending liberal and practical arts into a 2+2 secondary-postsecondary articulated curriculum leading to an associate degree. Tech prep is a cornerstone of the Carl D. Perkins…

Designed as part of the Life Centered Career Education Curriculum, the book describes activities for use with elementary and middle school students with and without disabilities. The Life Centered Career Education Curriculum organizes 22 major competencies and 102 subcompetencies into three domains: daily living skills, personal-social skills, and…

Place-based education, which draws from local culture, history, and geography to create a meaningful curriculum, holds particular promise for rural homeschooling. Following a brief review of the homeschooling phenomenon, this digest identifies ways that rural place-based education can counter common concerns about homeschooling. In 1999 about 1.7…

Many educators see school downsizing efforts as the linchpin of school restructuring. Several forms that school downsizing efforts are taking are explored, along with a discussion of the reasons for which small schools are being established. The types of subschools that are being launched (houses, mini-schools, schools-within-schools) are…

The nine references in this bibliography were selected through a computer search of the Educational Resources Information Center (ERIC) database. The following titles are included: (1) "Multimedia in Education" (Sueann Ambron and Kristina Hooper); (2) "Hypermedia in Academia" (Robert Beck and Donald Spicer); (3) "Design Considerations for…

Schools and school districts across the United States are establishing and expanding foreign language programs. Although most programs are found at the secondary school level, an increasing number are being established in elementary schools. A survey by the Center for Applied Linguistics indicates that 31% of U.S. elementary schools are offering…