This essay examines the author's experiences with becoming a teacher-researcher-leader across many years within two contrasting urban public school contexts. The article works against a traditional "myth" that views teaching as de-professionalized, low-skill and instead argues for teaching as professional, collaborative, political, and…

Teacher development does not stop when a degree is earned--at that point, it has barely taken flight. Real teacher growth happens when meaningful time and safe and authentic space are given to discussing and refining practice under the guidance of a pedagogically and contextually experienced mentor. Here, one teacher leader recounts her purposeful…

When school communities are troubled by violence, or threats of violence, at the hands of young people, educators have an opportunity to learn about aggression and adolescent identity development. A disturbing threat incident provides the point of departure for this principal's reflection on how high school curriculum can better meet the identity…

This essay addresses the care of the self as an important aspect in the development of educational leaders. It draws upon Michel Foucault's analysis of power and its relationship to his understanding of ethics as a practice one cultivates and takes on in the interests of leadership development. Foucault's work in these areas is timely for graduate…

In this essay, John S. O'Connor and Avi D. Lessing discuss the increasingly reductive and routinized nature of contemporary schools and the costs such an approach holds for students and teachers alike. The current approach is especially troublesome in light of the rich history of progressive voices, such as Paul Diederich, who have cautioned…

This descriptive study examined the dynamics of partnership over time between a training school and a college of education. Its purpose was to provide a deeper understanding of the dynamics of collaboration within the context of the partnership between the school and the college. The dynamics of the changes occurring in this collaboration over a…

This "From the Archives" article was originally published in Japanese in v6 n3 Mar 1936 of the Japanese-language journal "Shinkyo" (New Teachings), a periodical publication of the Soka Kyoiku Gakkai, the Society for Value-Creating Education, established by Tsunesaburo Makiguchi in 1930. This installment of "On Attitudes…

Taking its title from a passage in Tsunesaburo Makiguchi's 1936 serialized essay "On Attitudes toward Education," this article introduces, contextualizes, and briefly analyzes that essay in relation to the larger Makiguchi corpus. Specifically, this article examines Makiguchi's view of the proper attitudes toward education and effective…

The most productive way to reform education would be to invest in effective early childhood education programs. Such an investment would produce remarkable educational, social, and economic benefits. It would also transcend the current divisive debates about education reform by uniting advocates with different perspectives on issues of funding,…

Recently, as many as 50,000 migrant children from Central America have entered the United States without their parents. Under federal law, public schools must enroll a child who lives in the community, regardless of his or her immigration status. Ming and her twin brother Chang enrolled in my district's elementary school. Ming would not speak,…

Drawing primarily on interviews with a variety of teachers and other staff at a large urban Title 1 public school in California, Victoria Theisen-Homer paints an ethnographic portrait of how school personnel respond to undesirable changes. Although the school in this study, Skyline High School, had begun to thrive and most of the staff felt their…

In this essay, the authors reflect on the ongoing teacher effectiveness debate. W. David Hibler is an experienced language arts teacher, who has taught in public high schools and middle schools in Alaska, North Carolina, and New York City. Jeffrey Aaron Snyder is a historian of education who writes about schooling in the twentieth-century United…

This article revisits the Eight-Year Study, which was a set of simultaneous experiments in secondary education carried out by 30 schools from 1933 to 1941. These schools were free from the usual subject and unit requirements for college admission for a period of eight years, beginning with the class entering college in 1936. Freed from the demands…

This article describes a teacher-research project in which a class of fifth-grade English language learners demonstrated that learning about photography and using it as inspiration for their creative writing authenticated their writing task, helped them bring their outside-school worlds inside school, increased their enthusiasm for writing, and…

Whether stemming from dysfunctional families, abuse, emotional responses to societal violence, the threat of terrorism, school shootings, or escaping the day-to-day tedium that life places before us, today's learners are vulnerable to loss and the grief, sorrow, depression, and anger that accompany such loss. This essay, written from the lead…