Describes a project to help teachers and administrators identify challenging goals for professional development. Activities that help to heighten awareness include breaking routine, changing perspective, examining assumptions, and reading challenging material. Two important ingredients for the professional development process are time and…

An elementary school teacher in a K-8 Minneapolis public alternative school describes the benefits of choice for her own children and for those in her multiage classroom. Her school's whole-child approach allows students to structure their learning time and teachers to choose the most nurturing learning strategies to suit each child's needs. (MLH)

Discusses data warehousing, which provides information more fully responsive to local, state, and federal data needs. Such a system allows educators to generate reports and analyses that supply information, provide accountability, explore relationships among different kinds of data, and inform decision-makers. (Contains one figure and eight…

Now that regular elementary classroom teachers must plan their lessons around special "pull-out" programs, their responsibilities are compounded and their control over instructional time considerably diminished. This article discusses the benefits of parallel block scheduling as a possible solution. Includes seven endnotes. (MLH)

Following the Oklahoma City bombing, fifth graders at a nearby elementary school coped with ensuing uncertainty, pain, and loss. They wrote appreciative letters to fire and rescue workers; shared personal stories with classmates; compiled an anthology of poems, prayers, and stories; attended an assembly to honor parents participating in rescue…

Although at-risk children develop more problems than the general population, many become healthy, competent young adults. Resilient children usually possess social competence, problem-solving skills, autonomy, and a sense of purpose and future. Families, schools, and communities protecting children from adversity are characterized by caring and…

The theory of inner leadership stresses the importance of establishing and maintaining constructive thought patterns. Teachers can learn to replace certain kinds of dysfunctional thinking (like overgeneralizing, disqualifying the positive, jumping to conclusions, and personalizing) by constructively analyzing their internal dialog, mental images,…

The Comprehensive Achievement Monitoring (CAM) program revolves around a series of tests regularly administered to students with immediate feedback to students and teachers. (Author/MLF)

For uncritical users, the Web can be a tangle of misinformation. A teacher offers tips to help educators and student evaluate the validity of Web sites. The four Ws of site validation involve determining who wrote the site, what the site is saying, when the site was created, and where it originated. Learners should not rely solely on Web resources…

Although no school is immune from violence, a school can increase its resistance by identifying and seeking consensus about a safety problem, organizing a central committee, studying the problem, formulating a plan, conducting a safety audit, and training crisis response teams. Taking action to lessen staff's fears and vulnerability can improve…

A survey shows that California's charter-schools movement is being shaped by the special features of the state's charter law--exclusive local oversight and ambiguous legal status. Each school must negotiate how it handles its local school board, teachers' unions, and lack of start-up funding and technical assistance. Most charter schools seek…

The Instructional Leadership Project of the Anne Arundel County (Maryland) Public Schools determined staff development needs in the district's secondary schools and designed a three-year program to help administrators, guidance personnel, and department chairpersons build the requisite staff development skills. (PGD)

Charter schools are independent legal entities empowered to hire and fire, handle lawsuits, and control their own finances. Charter schools require new relationships with school boards, utilize site-based decision making, and foster new teacher roles. Minnesota, California, and Massachusetts are experimenting with charter schools. A sidebar…

The typical administrator certification program does not devote specific attention to shootings, suicide, terminal illness, and natural disasters. A crisis of major proportion calls for enlightened leadership: a take-charge manner, combined with effective teamwork and delegation of vital operations. Crisis teams should exist at regional, district,…

In Temple Independent School District (Texas), the success of strategic planning is evident in increased community and parent involvement, renewed public confidence, and a sense of control over the future. Over 250 community and school people participated in developing the district's plan. Site-based strategic planning extended active involvement…