NIUSI

part of the Education Reform Networks

Group Practice & Professional Development

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• "Challenge Us; I Think We're Ready": Establishing a Multicultural Course of Study
  Discusses how students can relate to Mark Mathabane's autobiographical novel "Kaffir Boy"--his questioning why he must attend school, his open defiance of his father, and his struggle to resist peer pressure. Examines where an all-white high-school faculty started in terms of developing a multicultural literature program, where they have been, and where they see the program in the near future.
• "Would I Use This Book?" White, Female Education Students Examine Their Beliefs About Teaching
  Examines the interplay of two added components to a reading/language arts methods course: professional readings informed by diverse viewpoints; and participation in a multicultural literature discussion group. Explores how this methods course extended students' understanding and beliefs about teaching the history and lives of the varied groups of people who make up the United States.
• A "Tempest" Project: Shakespeare and Critical Conflicts
  Describes a 4-week unit of study that focuses on Shakespeare's "The Tempest," a text that has been especially controversial in today's climate of increased multicultural awareness. Involves students in a larger conversation about the possibilities for reading and interpreting literature and prepares them to write mature analyses of the play.
• A collaboration model for school and community music collaboration.
  Considers a collaboration model (Eastman-Rochester Partnership) between an urban school district music program and a nationally recognized collegiate-level school of music. Explains that the purpose of this coalition is to build a new model of urban music education while restoring a once outstanding inner-city music program.
• A Critical Analysis of the Multicultural Counseling Competencies: Implications for the Practice of Mental Health Counseling
  Discusses the implications of adopting the Multicultural Counseling Competencies created by the Association for Multicultural Counseling and Development for members of the American Mental Health Counseling Association and other counseling practitioners. Suggests that more empirical data need to be collected before the Competencies are required of practicing counselors or implemented in counselor education programs.
• A Dose of Empathy
  Argues that teachers cannot teach empathy, generosity, and kindness in the same way they teach solving a math problem, but that teachers can help raise awareness of these values and affirm them whenever possible. Describes five picture books that examine the importance of reaching out to others, and that may help move students from intellectual understanding to compassionate action.
• A Good Start: A Progressive, Transactional Approach to Diversity in Pre-service Teacher Education
  A study examined what three English-as-second-language preservice teachers learned in a progressive, transactional methods course about teaching culturally and linguistically diverse children. Although the course did not instill the deep cross-cultural understanding necessary for bicultural competence, it did cultivate the student teachers' desire to value and respect other cultures.
• A longitudinal study of learning to use children’s thinking in mathematics instruction
  Multi-year study that examined the changes in the beliefs and instruction of 21 primary grade teachers with their participation in a Cognitively Guided Instruction (CGI) program.
• A new high school design focused on student performance.
  Performance-driven schools create a results-oriented culture, strongly support staff development, build community services and supports for students, help parents support their children's academic progress and develop an inclusive school leadership style.
• A parent-culture’s perceptions of parent involvement.
  A phenomenolographical research project surveyed a culture of 26 participating parents in one district. Involved parents are motivated to pursue involvement in their children’s lives both in and outside of school and with their children’s friends.
• A professional development school partnership: Conflict and collaboration
  The Professional Develpment School (PDS) is one of the most prominent, compelling, and recent models of teacher education reform. For decades efforts have been made to reform the U.S.
• A Study of the Gender Role Orientations of Beginning Counselors
  Counseling literature and the Council for Accreditation of Counseling and Related Educational Programs' (1994) accreditation standards advocate gender-sensitive counseling practices. However, the effects of socialization processes on counselor education students concerning gender role orientation may interfere with that mandate.
• About a Recent Review of Research on Family/School Linkages?
  Family School Linkages Project: Building Better Relationships Between School Personnel & the Families of their Students Adapted from a report by Anne Henderson & Karen Mapp, National Center for Family & Community Connections with Schools.This report reviewed 80 research studies and literature reviews. The book provides details on 51 of these studies.
• About Families and Schools as Partners
  Family School Linkages Project: Building Better Relationships between School Personnel & the Families of their Students Adapted from J.E. Funkhouse.
• About Homework and Families?
  Family School Linkages Project: Building Better Relationships Between School Personnel & the Families of their Students By Dianne Ferguson & Anne Stilwell.Homework seems to have been part of school forever. Teachers assign it.
• About the Difference Between "Parent Involvement" and "Family/Community Linkages"?
  Family School Linkages Project: Building Better Relationships Between School Personnel & the Families of their Students.School personnel have long talked about the need for “parent involvement”. In recent years the language has shifted slightly to “family involvement” in order to honor that many other family members – siblings, aunts and uncles, even close friends and neighbors – support and nurture children and youth and may play significant roles in their education.
• About the role of "cultural capital" for families?
  School personnel in urban schools often talk about the fact that some parents seem to be ?involved? and others not. Some parents come to meetings and events, respond to school phone calls and invitations, and help their sons and daughters with homework.
• Absent from the Research, Present in Our Classrooms: Preparing Culturally Responsive Chinese American Teachers
  Documents the paucity of research on Chinese American teachers, noting how this contributes to the invisibility of Asian Americans as frontline participants in education and exploring bilingual Chinese American teachers' perceptions of the multicultural course requirement in teacher preparation. Data from teacher interviews, surveys, focus groups, documents, and observations indicated that most respondents believed courses were designed for the dominating group and excluded them from the teaching-learning process.
• Building an International Student Teaching Program: A California/Mexico Experience
  This paper describes the first year of an international student teaching project conducted in Mexicali, Mexico, which was successful in helping U.S. participants develop cultural understanding and critical teaching skills needed to work with English learners.
• Building cultural reciprocity with families: Case studies in special education. .
  By employing a posture of cultural reciprocity to build a framework for relationships between professionals and parents or caregivers educators and professionals will be more prepared to meet the needs of every student while respecting individual beliefs, even when these beliefs conflict with the culture of special education.
• CAIS/ACSI 2001: Beyond the Web: Technologies, Knowledge and People
  Presents abstracts of papers presented at the 29th Annual Conference of the Canadian Association for Information Science (CAIS) held in Quebec on May 27-29, 2001. Topics include: professional development; librarian/library roles; information technology uses; virtual libraries; information seeking behavior; literacy; information retrieval; multicultural education; information science; and knowledge management.
• Canadian Mathematics Education Study Group = Groupe Canadien d'Etude en Didactique des Mathematiques. Proceedings of the Annual Meeting (25th, Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, May 25-29, 2001)
  This document contains the proceedings of the 2001 annual meeting of the Canadian Mathematics Education Study Group (CMESG) held at the University of Alberta, May 25-39, 2000.
• Capitalizing on Leadership in Rural Special Education: Making a Difference for Children and Families. Conference Proceedings (Alexandria, Virginia, March 16-18, 2000)
  This proceedings contains 57 presentations and presentation summaries concerned with rural special education. The papers are arranged in 11 sections: impacting governmental policy, at risk, collaborative education models, early childhood education, gifted, multicultural, parents and families, preservice and inservice teacher education, technology, transition, and other.
• Challenges and consequences of standards-based reform: A brief analysis based on evaluation data from school districts supported by the Edna McConnell Clark Foundation
  Describes five positive outcomes of the Clark Foundation's support for standards-based middle school reform in Corpus Christi, San Diego, and Long Beach districts. Districts developed and implemented content and performance standards and provided principals, as well as teachers, with professional development focused on improving instruction.
• Challenges of Urban Education: Sociological Perspectives for the Next Century
  Challenges of Urban Education includes a range of topics from quantitive analyses of student demographics to the description and analysis of urban high school students' creative writing. The book bridges the dualisms of local and global, theory and practice, and structure and agency.
• Changes in Preservice Teachers' Knowledge and Beliefs about Language Issues
  Examined how predominantly female, white preservice teachers' knowledge and beliefs about language issues changed after an intensive multicultural education course. Data from surveys and course assignments indicated that students made significant gains in three areas: personal beliefs about diversity; professional beliefs about diversity; and multicultural education knowledge.
• Classroom Spaces That Work. Strategies for Teachers Series.
  Based on the responsive classroom approach, this guide for educators of kindergarten through grade 6 is designed to help teachers set up physical spaces that are conducive to effective learning and teaching.
• Co-teaching for content understanding: A school-wide model. Journal of Educational & Psychological Consultation
  Describes a promising form of professional collaboration: co-teaching between a content area teacher and a special education teacher. Essential to the success of co-teaching partnerships were collaborative school structures, equal status rules for teachers, a commitment to all students' learning, and strong content knowledge.
• Collaborative action research projects: Enhancing teacher development in professional developmnet schools
  Investigated how collaborative action research projects affected five pre-service teachers' professional development while working with on-site teacher educators within a Professional Development School. Data from interviews, conferences, journals, action research, student writings, and field notes indicated that these experiences helped pre-service teachers gain valuable insights about self as teacher, students, curriculum, teaching, and teacher roles and responsibilities.
• Collaborative Research in Inclusive Classrooms: An Investigation with Reflections by Teachers and Researchers
  Participatory Research and Development (PR&D) is a means of integrating research and practice by linking the historically separate communities of university research practice as one learning community. More specificially, PR&D is designed to impact teacher thinking and instruction, student performance, as well as school and university systems and culture.
• Collective Reflection as an Alternative Methodology in Curriculum Research and Teaching: Representations in Global Perspectives
  This paper describes an alternative methodology used to study students' constructions of meaning as they engage in a curriculum-making project while taking "Global Perspectives," a foundational graduate preservice teacher education course at Pace University, New York.
• Community, Higher Education, and the Challenge of Multiculturalism
  Uses John Dewey's pragmatism to theorize a relevant and effective understanding of collegiate community within liberal culture, suggesting that if multiculturalism were understood and enacted on college campuses in Deweyan ways, it would introduce a method of thinking or intelligent learning that would make the ideal of community possible for higher education institutions. (SM).
• Comparing PDS and campus-based pre-service teacher preparation: Is PDS-based preparation really better?
  Reports on a 2-year study comparing the lesson planning, teaching effectiveness, post lesson reflectivity, and content retention of professional teaching knowledge for teachers prepared at a PDS or campus-based program. During the 1st year of teaching, PDS-prepared teachers scored significantly higher than campus-prepared teachers on teaching effectiveness.
• Conditions for Co-teaching: Lessons from a Case Study
  Co-teaching -- general and special education teachers teaching together in a general education classroom -- is frequently offered as a means of promoting inclusion of students with disabilities in the general education curriculum but few researchers have examined the context in which special educators co-teach.
• Conducting Focus Groups to Develop a Comprehensive School Portrait
  Focus groups are an effective means of collecting qualitative information that can be used to guide improvement planning and efforts. Building Leadership Teams can use focus groups to find out almost anything about the climate, day-to-day operations, and individual perceptions of the school.
• Congruence Between Roles and Actions of Secondary Special Educators in Co-Taught and Special Education Settings
  We examined co-teaching in secondary classrooms by interviewing and observing special education teachers in co-taught and special education classrooms. Using qualitative methods and a grounded theory (constant-comparative) method of data analysis, we identified salient, recurrent patterns that suggested a description of co-teaching definitions, roles, and instructional actions and then compared this description to roles and actions in special education classrooms.
• Coordination among schools, families, and communities:Prospects for Educational Reform.
  Improving the connection among schools, families, and communities has emerged as a recent focus of the educational reform movement. Both the diverse goals of the coordinated services movement and variety of models are presented.
• Creating Safety To Address Controversial Issues: Strategies for the Classroom
  Presents seven elements of a safe classroom in controversy-driven courses, where students can exchange ideas rather than emotions as they learn and discuss. The elements are: collegiality, empowerment, role modeling, preparation, shared purpose, reflection, and commitment.
• Creativity and Collaborative Learning: The Practical Guide to Empowering Students, Teachers, and Families. Second Edition
  These 24 papers explain how using the collaborative learning model can help teachers address classroom challenges.
• Critical Issue Bibliography (CRIB) Sheet: Multiculturalism and Faculty Development.
  One of the key areas in the creation of a multicultural environment on college campuses is faculty development. This CRitical Issue Bibliography (CRIB) Sheet focuses on faculty development as a key component of the multicultural campus environment.
• Cultural Competence for Transracial Adoptive Parents
  Provides a clear conceptual definition of cultural competence for transracial-cultural adoptive (TRA) parents based on an extensive review of the literature and feedback from experts and parents. A three part definition of cultural competence for TRA parents includes: racial awareness, multicultural planning, and survival skills.
• Cultural Identity and Teaching
  Understanding your own cultural background, and connecting that background to that of the students in your classroom as you explore the connections you have and the different ways you might look at things creates a rich learning environment in which the teacher and students can all participate, be valued, and learn.
  Download the document here.
• Culture and Professional Education: The Experiences of Native American Social Workers
  A qualitative survey explored the professional educational experiences of 63 Native American social workers and social work students. Most respondents identified the need for more cultural content in the curriculum, personal struggles experienced in pursuing an education grounded in Anglo cultural norms, but also available supports, especially other Native Americans.
• De Que Colores: A Critical Examination of Multicultural Children's Books
  Examines children's books which highlighted multicultural issues, with the understanding that what is said about multiculturalism is as important, if not more so, than the simple fact that multiculuralism is discussed. Uses an adaptation of Mulvey's (1975) "gaze," to examine whiteness in seven multicultural children's books.
• Desegregation in a Diverse and Competitive Environment: Admissions at Lowell High School
  To comply with the district desegregation plan, the San Francisco Unified School District previously required higher scores for Chinese American applicants to its academic magnet high school than for more underrepresented groups. Examines the admissions debate, suggesting that exclusion of Asian and Latino concerns in district policymaking led to a lawsuit by several Chinese parents.
• Developing Globally Literate Leaders
  Suggests a need to reexamine core competencies of executives and developing world-class organizations. Provides 12 steps to achieving globally competent leaders.
• Differentiating cooperative learning
  Encourages teachers to implement cooperative learning more thoughtfully and differentiate tasks within the group to personalize learning for each student. Challenging individual students to appreciate their peers’ diverse competencies and experiences leads to educational equity.
• Directory of TRIO Programs, 2000-2001.
  The institutions and agencies in this directory sponsor federally funded TRIO programs that enable students from low-income families to enter college and graduate. The TRIO programs (originally only a "trio" of programs) include Talent Search, Student Support Services, Upward Bound, Upward Bound Math and Science, Veterans Upward Bound, Educational Opportunity Centers, and the Ronald E.
• District and state policy influences on professional development and school capacity.
  Examines the effects on different aspects of school capacity of several recent reforms related to professional development. The reforms include teacher networks in California, the use of consultants and intervisitation in New York City's District 2, student assessments in Kentucky and Maryland, and school improvement plans in South Carolina.
• Diversity Education for Preservice Teachers: Strategies and Attitude Outcomes
  Analyzed the impact of emphasizing diversity in a foundations of education course. Various instructional strategies addressed issues of intolerance and promoted understanding of the importance of multicultural education for teachers.
• Diversity Initiatives in Higher Education: A Case Study of Multicultural Organizational Development through the Lens of Religion, Spirituality, Faith, and Secular Inclusion
  Presents a case study of the University of Maryland Office of Human Relations Programs' (OHRP) efforts to confront Christian privilege and build a religiously, spiritually, faith-based, and secularly inclusive community campus-wide. Highlights four stages: rifts and tensions, reconnecting, reconceptualization, and realization.
• Do increased levels of parental involvement account for social class differences in track placement? .
  The article examines whether increased levels of school involvement among socially advantaged parents account for children’s advantage in track placement in United States high schools.
• Does Diversity Make a Difference? Three Research Studies on Diversity in College Classrooms
  This report contains three studies on diversity in college classrooms. Following a review of the historical background in the introduction, Part 1, "University Faculty Views about the Value of Diversity on Campus and in the Classroom," offers a discussion of various diversity issues, such as institutional and departmental values; effects on classrooms, research, and teaching; negative effects; student benefits; responses of faculty; and comparisons of male and female responses.
• Encouraging and Recruiting Students of Color To Teach
  Examined the impact of the Teaching as a Career Workshop, which stressed the need for minority teachers, on high school students' perceptions about teaching. Participants considered it important for people of color to become teachers and believed the workshop influenced them to select teaching careers.
• Energizing Teacher Education and Professional Development with Problem-Based Learning
  This collection of papers presents a variety of field-tested examples that use problem-based learning (PBL) for teacher education in many professional development settings. It describes PBL activities for preservice, novice, and experienced educators at all levels.
• Engaging Black Learners in Adult and Community Education. NIACE Lifelines in Adult Learning
  This guide explains how adult and community education (ACE) providers across Great Britain can engage black learners in ACE by making their learning programs relevant, challenging, and appropriate to adult learners from black and minority groups.
• Ethnicity and Comparative Youth Disaffection in Multicultural Contexts: Some Multiracial Experiences of Education in Thanet and Lille
  Explored youth disaffection, focusing on K-12 schools in England and France. Data from student interviews, staff interviews, and classroom observations indicated that educational inclusion in the two countries was not meeting the educational needs of disaffected youth.
• Exploring connections between the construct of teacher efficacy and family involvement practices.
  The purpose of this exploratory study was to investigate the relationship between teachers’ level of self-efficacy and the degree of family involvement practices reported by teachers in their classrooms. The theoretical framework was based on Bandura’s Teacher Efficacy Scale.
• Exploring the Landscape of Canadian Teacher Education
  Reviews the context of Canadian teacher education, highlighting changes in the educational landscape, in the population (e.g., the multicultural nature of society and shifting urban/rural trends), and in how people think about professional education and discussing the professional development of in-service teachers. An overview of formal and informal professional development in Canada is included.
• Extending the Possibilities of Multicultural Professional Development in Public Schools
  A 3-year qualitative study documented and critiqued a city school system's efforts to enlighten faculty and staff through multicultural professional development. Examples from the study show how the district attempted to introduce a more inclusive schooling approach and extend the virtues of multicultural professional development.
• Facilitating Multicultural Programming through Cooperative Extension FCS Programs
  Responses from 122 extension professionals showed that 56% offered programs targeted to specific groups. Deterrents to multicultural programs included lack of time, resources, and limited training; 95% recognized the need to address cultural differences and were receptive to learning about different groups.
• Faculty study groups: solving “good problems” through study, reflection, and collaboration.
  Describes the development, implementation, and assessment of a faculty study group program designed to foster teaching as a reflective, collaborative activity within a research university. The process is clearly outlined and takes planning but provides a guide for teachers to use this process.
• Families and schools: the effect of parental involvement on high school completion.
  This study used data from the National Education Longitudinal Study (NIELS) of 1988 and Higher Linear Modeling to examine the impact of parent involvement on high school graduation rates for European American, Latino, Asian American, and Native American families. The findings reflected that different types of parental involvement were important in a student’s high school completion, depending on ethnicity.
• Family-School Partnership Increases School Readiness
  Highlights components of an early intervention program for preschool children and families that operates in the multicultural community of Miami (Dade County) Florida. (GCP).
• Flexible grouping and student learning in a high-needs school.
  Gives the results of a five year study that used flexible groups to meet the needs of learners identified as having high-needs. Students ability to master skills increased as teachers usage of flexible groups increased.
• From Racial Stereotyping and Deficit Discourse toward a Critical Race Theory in Teacher Education
  Examines connections between critical race theory (CRT) and its application to the concepts of race, racial bias, and racial stereotyping in teacher education. Defines CRT, then discusses racism and stereotyping, racial stereotypes in the media, and racial stereotypes in professional environments, noting the effects on minority students.
• From Rhetoric to Reality: Opportunity-to-Learn Standards and the Integrity of American Public School Reform
  Focusing on national policy and practice, this paper suggests key recommendations for consideration in the context of standards-based reform, including: produce teachers who are multiculturally literate; re-assess ability grouping and tracking practices; reduce K-3 class size and elementary and secondary school size; expand and improve federal compensatory education programs; and incorporate school reform into broader social reform. (SM).
• Fulfilling the Promise of Access and Opportunity: Collaborative Community Colleges for the 21st Century. New Expeditions: Charting the Second Century of Community Colleges. Issues Paper No. 3
  This document is part of the New Expeditions series, published by the American Association of Community Colleges. Addressed specifically in this paper is the need for collaboration within and between community colleges if they are to fulfill their role as democratic agencies concerned with access and equity issues.
• Gathering Strength: Canada's Aboriginal Action Plan. A Progress Report = Rassembler nos forces: Le plan d'action du Canada pour les questions autochtones. Rapport d'etape.
  Gathering Strength is an integrated government-wide plan to address the key challenges facing Canada's Aboriginal people.
• Genograms and Family Sculpting: An Aid to Cross-Cultural Understanding in the Training of Psychology Students in South Africa
  Describes a specific training method developed in a family therapy course at the University of Pretoria in South Africa, where genograms and family sculpting were used to improve cross-cultural understanding among psychology masters students. Discusses the theoretical implications of the group training process for the training of psychologists in multicultural contexts.
• Giving It a Second Thought: Making Culturally Engaged Teaching Culturally Engaging
  Considers that one way to create teacher education programs that build strategies for culturally engaged teaching is through cultural memoir and photography. Presents a study addressing the challenges of multicultural teacher education and the potential of culturally engaged teacher education.
• Highly successful and loving, public elementary schools populated mainly by low-SES children of color: Core beliefs and cultural characteristics.
  There is a popular assumption about the pervasive school failure of students of color whom are also from households with low SES. These highly successful schools are academically competitive with – and even superior to – the better Anglo schools suggesting that these schools may have developed a better model for schooling.
• How Do District Management and Implementation Strategies Relate to the Quality of the Professional Development That Districts Provide to Teachers?
  Study uses the data from a national probability sample of district professional development coordinators in districts that received federal funding from the Eisenhower Professional Development Program. Results found that management/implementation strategies, such as aligning professional development to standards and assessments, continuous improvement efforts, and teacher involvement in planning, are associated with the provision of higher quality professional development for teachers.
• How Multiple Intelligences Theory Can Guide Teachers' Practices: Ensuring Success for Students with Disabilities
  This OnPoint explored the intersection between Muultiple intelligence(MI) and special education. MI can be used to improve the learning opportunities for diverse learners, and it has a positive impact on both students with special needs and their teachers.
• How Whiteness Frames the Beliefs of White Female Pre-Service Teachers Working with English Language Learners of Color
  This paper reports on a study that attempted to make white female student teachers aware of their racism in order to improve their capacity to teach in a multicultural and antiracist classroom. Despite meaning well, many white student teachers of children of color exhibit racism, for example, in the form of low expectations, resentment, and antipathy toward their students of color.
• Implementation Strategies for Creating an Environment of Achievement
  Convinced of the educational benefits of campus diversity, Mt. Holyoke College (Massachusetts) developed policies and practices to foster the academic and social skills needed for success in a diverse society.
• Improving Education: The Promise of Inclusive Schooling
  The mission of the National Institute for Urban School Improvement is to partner with RRCS to develop powerful networks of urban LEAS and schools that embrace and implement a data-based, continuous improvement approach for inclusive practices. Embedded within this approach is a commitment to evidence-based practice in early intervention, universal design,literacy and positive behavior supports.
• Improving Pupil Attendance: Inclusive and Sensitive Approaches
  Describes a British secondary school's efforts to improve student attendance by promoting social inclusion. The project involved a first day absence monitor, school counselor, Education Welfare Officer, and specialist teacher.
• Improving teaching, improving learning: Linking professional development to improved student achievement.
  Professional development is important in raising student achievement, because better teaching results in better student learning.
• In Search of Wholeness: African American Teachers and Their Culturally Specific Classroom Practices
  This collection of essays is a theoretical and practice-oriented treatment of how culture and race influence African American teachers.
• Increasing African-American Teachers' presence in American Schools: voices of students who care.
  Presents the narratives of several African American students to illustrate the impact on students of having or not having African American teachers. Students' descriptions of their interactions with and praise for African American teachers illuminate why recruiting more teachers of color is important not only to the profession but also to the students themselves.
• Increasing Preservice Teachers' Diversity Beliefs and Commitment
  Explored the attitudes, beliefs, and commitments to diversity of a predominantly Anglo-American population of preservice teachers enrolled in a diversity course. Results described beginning ethnorelative attitudes, beliefs, and commitments after participation in the diversity course; some theoretical underpinnings for understanding change (or lack of change); and a framework for facilitating positive multicultural experiences.
• Influence of state policy on standards and school practices: A comparison of three urban districts.
  Urban districts in Cleveland, Chicago, and Detroit that were implementing standards-based reforms in their schools were investigated to identify features of their accountability systems. Authors sought to understand the role of standards within each context and to understand the influence of state policy on school and classroom practices.
• Integrating Nonminority Instructors into the Minority Environment
  Examines the factors facilitating the effectiveness of nonminority faculty members at institutions with a predominantly minority student body. Concludes that self-awareness of one's racial identity and how it informs one's expectations about learning styles and appropriate classroom behavior is vital.
• Interactive Drama: A Method for Experiential Multicultural Training
  The authors present interactive drama as a medium to create learning about multicultural and diversity issues in the basis of cognitive-experiential self-theory. Results of exploratory qualitative research suggest 2 interactive dramas had an impact on awareness, understanding, and skills.
• Introduction: Building an infrastructure for equity in mathematics education
  The article reports that the National Council of Teachers Mathematics (NCTM) has had the most profound influence on reform in mathematics education with the publications of its standards.
• Keeping It Real: Teaching and Learning about Culture, Literacy, and Respect
  Describes one teacher education program designed to broaden students' thinking about the influences of culture in society, and teaching and learning about literacy. Offers an "unromanticized glimpse" into the lives of teacher education students as they struggle to come to terms with their transformation as literacy educators preparing to teach literacy in multiracial, multiethnic, multilingual classrooms of the 21st century.
• Keeping the Faith & Climbing One Mountain at a Time:Reflections of Two Mothers on their Children’s Educational Journeys
  In this OnPoint we share the accounts of two mothers who have faced many challenges posed by schools and other human services agencies. Despite these challenges, discouragements, and setbacks, these two families, like many others of their “generation,” have endured, met the challenges, and developed a remarkable resiliency.
• Kenta, Kilts, and Kimonos: Exploring Cultures and Mathematics through Fabrics
  Describes uses of mathematics in fabric design to examine various cultural and mathematical concepts including patterns, geometric shapes, and spatial reasoning. (ASK).
• Kindergartens and Cultures: The Global Diffusion of an Idea
  This book is a study of the diffusion and transformation of the kindergarten around the turn of the twentieth century, concentrating most centrally on the power of local cultures to respond to and reformulate borrowed ideas.
• Leadership Academies - Module 2, Mining Data
  This module is designed to help building leadership teams learn the skills required to mine data and use it to make decisions. As principals and teacher leaders become confident in their ability to query their data, they will become strong role models and coaches for the entire faculty.
• Leadership Academies - Module 3, Inclusive Schools
  This module introduces the inclusive model of education, which proposes that, with support structures in place, all students are able to successfully learn in the general education classroom. Rather than teach students with special needs separately, general and special educators collaborate to address the needs of all students to allow them to learn together.
• Leadership Academies - Module 4, Co-teaching
  Co-teaching is a method for delivering instruction that draws on the strengths and expertise of multiple educators. Although there are many styles of co-teaching, each involves two or more educators collaborating to plan and deliver sound instruction for a group of students.
• Leadership and Change for the 21st Century: Preparing Educational Leaders To Foster Persistence and Achievement among Hispanic Students
  This document describes the Hispanic Border Leadership Institute (HBLI). The HBLI is both a leadership-development initiative and a doctoral fellowship program for educational leaders.
• Learning How To Ignore Racism: A Case Study of One White Beginning Teacher in "The White Highlands" and the Two Black Boys in Her Care
  This paper focuses on the experiences of one beginning teacher, studying the ways issues of race and ethnicity are dealt with in a predominately white elementary school. Faced with issues of racism in the classroom, the teacher had no strategies to handle either overt or covert racism, both of which appeared to be condoned by those responsible for her training.
• Leaving no child behind: Lessons from the Houston independent school district.
  Reports on an October 2000 conference in Houston called "Making the Grade," Descriptions of Houston's accomplishments, and of next steps, implications, and overall experience frame the last section of this report, which discusses the national implications of Houston's reform movement.
• Leaving too many children behind: A demographer's view on the neglect of America's youngest children.
  The Institute for Educational Leadership. Presents a discussion on understanding of why, in the wealthiest nation in the world, we invest such a pitifully small percentage of our resources and our concern in the early years of the people who will obviously inherit the nation—our youngest children.
• Less Talk, More Action for Multicultural Science
  The numbers indicate that science teachers are not reaching ethnic minority students as effectively as they could. The research literature is rife with recommendations for remediation.
• Life & Loss: A Guide To Help Grieving Children. Second Edition
  Because children experience grief in a variety of contexts, adults need a guide through the maze of thoughts and feelings that loss evokes for themselves and their children. This guide seeks to empower parents, educators, clergy, and health care professionals to handle children's loss and grief issues in an informed, open, and loving way, reducing the fear and denial often associated with these topics.
• Looking for answers in all the right places: Urban schools and universities solve the dilemma of teacher preparation together.
  Focuses on strategies to development university/school/system partnerships for educational renewal.
• Making mathematics work for all children: Issues of standards, testing, and equity.
  This article tells the importance of math literacy in our society, and the history of inequities associated with mathematics education; states that in recent years the new mathematics curricula enable more students to do better.
• Making the grade: Reinventing America’s schools.
  Describes how schools of today- and schools of the future- must respond to sweeping societal changes or they will remain mired in an obsolete and ineffective system of education.
• Math lessons: A case study in the adoption of an innovative math curriculum.
  Provides information on a case study regarding the adoption of an innovative math curriculum. Discusses how teachers responded to the changes and the process.
• Mediation and Conflict Resolution in a Multicultural Context: New Skills for Student Development Professionals
  With the increase in violence over the past few decades, academic and human development practitioners have tried to better understand the dynamics of conflict and develop effective intervention and prevention strategies. There is an ever-deepening appreciation for the mediation process.
• Mental Health in Urban Schools
  Many people hear the term mental health and they think mental illness. Others hear mental health in schools and they think it’s only about therapy and counseling.
• Mental Health in urban schools
  Many people hear the term mental health and they think mental illness. Others hear mental health in schools and they think it’s only about therapy and counseling.
• Mismatch: historical perspectives on schools and students who don't fit them
  Discusses how the differences in school environment and education affect student learning. Argues that educators should focus on adapting the school better to the child, to avoid a mismatch in the standards movement addressing social inequalities that extend beyond the classroom.
• Missed opportunities: How we keep high-quality teachers out of urban classrooms. .
  The New Teacher Project provides an in-depth study of urban district hiring practices and their effect on applicant attrition and teacher quality by analyzing data from four "hard to staff" districts. Data reveal that late hiring practices contribute more to the loss of high quality applicants than any other practice or policy of district human resource offices.
• Multicultural Aspects in the Education of Children and Youth with Autism and Other Developmental Disabilities: Introduction to the Special Issue
  This introductory article discusses cultural considerations in the design and delivery of services to families whose children have a moderate to severe disability. It calls attention to the lack of consideration of culturally and linguistically diverse families in the current research and summarizes the following articles.
• Multicultural Concerns: A Foundations Perspective and Discussion for Teacher Educators
  Old educational paradigms may not be the best approach to reconfiguring educational programs for the 21st century. Demographic projections for school-age children for the 21st century reveal an ethnically and linguistically rich population of students.
• Multicultural Science Education
  Describes multicultural education and lists its basic premises. Explains the importance of science teachers' attitudes in learning.
• Multicultural Service Learning: Educating Teachers in Diverse Communities
  This book explains the complex interplay of service learning, multicultural education, and teacher preparation. It shows how the author collaborated with community partners and preservice teachers to jointly construct the service learning supplement to a multicultural education course, from the bottom up.
• Multicultural Teaching: African-American Faculty Classroom Teaching Experiences in Predominantly White Colleges and Universities
  Explored classroom teaching challenges faced by African American faculty at a predominantly white college. Focus group interviews with black faculty indicated that the teachers believed white students felt their standards were too high and did not match white professors' expectations.
• Multiculturalism and Severe Disabilities
  This article discusses the need for educators to acquire the knowledge and skills necessary to help students with severe disabilities from mainstream groups to develop cross-cultural knowledge, values, and competencies. It outlines goals for multicultural understanding for educational researches, for teacher educators, and for school leaders and teachers.
• Multiracial Children and Developmentally Appropriate Practice in Brazil: Some Preliminary Observations
  This paper focuses on differences in Brazil and the United States in attitudes toward multiracial and multiethnic children and developmentally appropriate practice in education and child rearing. Child rearing in Brazil is characterized by a generally permissive approach with a high degree of patience, although parent-child relationships among the very poor are more direct and more punitive.
• My Eyes Have Been Opened: White Teachers and Racial Awareness.
  Examines the narratives of 6 White teachers of racially diverse classrooms who had been nominated as being "aware of race and racism" by a diverse panel of experts. Provided implications for restructuring teacher education programs include revising candidate selection criteria, increasing the racial diversity of students and faculty, experiencing "immersion" in communities of color, and using autobiographical narrative as a pedagogical tool.
• National Board Certification: Time To Accentuate The Positive
  Presents a chart on teacher quality improvement in schools in the United States. Requirement of written tests for beginning teachers; Discouragement of out-of-field teaching; Encouragement of professional support and training for teachers; Need for teachers to acquire a clinical experience.
• New Teacher Confidence: How Does It Develop?
  The purpose of this study was to investigate the confidence levels of new teachers and related factors. Seventy-seven first and second year teachers participating in a new teacher retention project filled out a survey.
• On Inclusion and the Other Kids:Here's What Research Shows so Far About Inclusion's Effect on Nondisabled Students.
  Inclusion is receiving lots of attention, both in school districts across the country and in the popular media. Most of that attention is focused on how inclusion affects the students with disabilities.
• On PreparingTeachers for the Future
  As American schools seek to accommodate an increasing range of students, teachers are challenged as never before. When students with disabilities, linguistic differences, or other unique abilities join general education classrooms, even willing teachers fear their lack of training and preparation to deal with such differences make their role as primary teacher inappropriate and inadequate.
• On Reconceptualizing Continuing Professional Development:A Framework for Planning
  Institutions of higher education, districts and state education agencies must create together the strategies, incentives, and options that will promote educators’ learning of the new practices and perspectives that will generally change this core of practice. Meeting such a challenge requires reconceptualizing both staff and professional development for urban districts where significant numbers of teachers are not licensed, where even licensed teachers leave after a few years and where working conditions are often poor and deteriorating.
• On the Nexus of Race, Disability, and Overrepresentation: What Do We Know? Where Do We Go?
  America’s schools are more culturally diverse and complex than at any time in the nation’s history. The schools continue to have problems with overrepresentation as long as they develop educational structures, systems, routines, and pedagogies without understanding more about how the belief systems, biases, prejudices, and socioeconomic inequities that have existed for centuries in the American society are played out and perpetuated in our nation’s schools.
• On Time and How to Get More of It
  Today’s schools are striving to meet the challenges of systemic reform and school improvement. It is a big and complicated job.
• On Working Together:Groupwork, Teamwork, and Collaborative Work Among Teachers
  As schools restructure and reform for the 21st Century, educators are being required to work together in more and more ways.
  Download the document here.
• Online compared to face-to-face teacher preparation for learning standards-based planning skills
  This study compared pre-service teachers' learning of instructional planning in two pairs of asynchronous online and face-to-face (FTF) courses aligned with national standards for teacher preparation. The quasi-experimental design was supported by interviews of a purposive sample of participants.
• Outcomes for students with and without learning disabilities in inclusive classrooms.
  Focuses on intensive staff development for general and special educators that taught the educators how to implement instructional strategies with students who had a wide range of abilities in an inclusive classroom.
• Perceptions versus Preferences: Adult International Students' Teaching-Learning Experiences in an American University
  International students' perceptions of and preferences for the teaching-learning process in a U.S. university was assessed.
• Planning for school change: School-community collaboration in a full service elementary school.
  Presents a qualitative study of a planning year for a full-service elementary school, with a focus on conflicts and tensions arising from the school-community cooperation.
• Poverty, class, and disability: A historical, social and political perspective.
  Presents a historical, social and political perspective on poverty, class and disability particularly regarding benefits to students who have been classified as having "special needs," and the necessity of inclusion and special education reform.
• Predictive Characteristics of Multicultural Counselling Competence
  This paper looks at multicultural counseling competencies from a national sample of Canadian Guidance and Counseling Association members.
• Preparing for Culturally Responsive Teaching.
  Discusses improving the school success of ethnically diverse students through culturally responsive teaching and for preparing teachers in pre-service education programs with the knowledge, attitudes, and skills needed to do this.
• Preparing K-12 Teachers To Teach for Social Justice: An Experimental Exercise with a Focus on Inequality and Life-Chances Based on Sico-Economic Status
  Describes a preservice multicultural education and social foundations course designed to expand awareness of and encourage an appreciation and respect for diversity, highlighting an experiential exercise that focuses on institutional inequities of socioeconomic status and that promotes critical thinking, cooperative group work, and making use of multiple intelligences. (SM).
• Preparing Special Educators To Meet the Needs of Linguistically Diverse Students with Disabilities. Final Report
  This final report describes the activities and outcomes of a University of Northern Colorado project designed to enhance programs for preparing teachers to work with students with sensory impairments from linguistically diverse backgrounds. Project accomplishments included: (1) financially supporting 18 trainees who were pursuing a graduate degree in 1 of the 3 low-incidence programs at the University of Northern Colorado (hearing, vision, or multiple disabilities); (2) developing a course that introduced issues related to the educational needs of students with low-incidence disabilities who come from multicultural communities; (3) infusing competencies addressing the needs of linguistically diverse students with low-incidence disabilities within existing courses; (4) targeting recruiting efforts to attract qualified bilingual trainees, or trainees interested in developing second language competences and teaching students from non-English speaking communities; (5) conducting a multi-state needs assessment of current practices and competencies needed by teachers working with linguistically diverse students with low-incidence disabilities; (6) supplementing a resource library with assessments and instructional materials designed for linguistically diverse students; and (7) establishing an advisory committee to guide the project in achieving its goals.
• Preparing Teachers for Diversity: A Dilemma of Quality and Quantity. Teaching and California's Future
  This report explores the absence in educational reform of attention to preparing teachers to work with culturally and linguistically diverse students.
• Preparing teachers for inclusive classrooms.
  This article examines the topics of concern and questions expressed by six general education student teachers in a collaborative dialogue group focused on inclusive classrooms.
• Preparing, Recruiting, and Retaining Special Education Personnel in Rural Areas
  Nationwide, the shortage of special education teachers is expected to grow, fueled by expanding demand and high teacher attrition rates. The situation in Texas mirrors that of the nation.
• Principals of Inclusive schools
  Inclusive schools need principals who are familiar with the research literature and know that inclusive services and supports produce educational benefits for students with and without disabilities, teachers, and families.
  Download the document here .
• Professional Development Leadership and the Diverse Learner. Issues in Science Education
  This book focuses on the professional development of teachers and discusses issues related to science education reform. The content of the book is divided into two parts.
• Professional development school trade-offs in teacher preparation and renewal
  Examined the preparation of student teachers at four Professional Development Schools (PDSs) longitudinally, comparing their experiences with those of traditional student teachers. Data from meetings with administrators; site visits; document analysis; graduation and professional status information; student teacher surveys; and graduate surveys indicated that students appreciated PDSs' camaraderie, support, collaboration, and effectiveness.
• PT3. [SITE 2002 Section]
  This document contains 142 papers on PT3 (Preparing Tomorrow's Teachers to use Technology) from the SITE (Society for Information Technology & Teacher Education) 2002 conference.
• Raising Ethnic Minority Attainment: The Role of Curriculum 2000
  Describes the revision of the National Curriculum in England and discusses the potential of the revised curriculum for raising the achievement of ethnic minority students. The curriculum demonstrates a clear commitment to the education of minorities and includes provisions for citizenship and health education.
• Reading Researchers in Search of Common Ground
  Investigating what 11 eminent literacy scholars with diverse philosophies could agree to regarding contexts and practices for teaching reading, this book presents comprehensive analyses of these findings, dubbed the "Expert Study," and their implications. It includes a reprint of the 1998 article "Points of Agreement: A Display of Professional Unity in Our Field," which provides background on the Expert Study; the voices of experts who took part in the study, along with additional distinguished literacy scholars who have specialized experiences and vantage points from which to view the Expert Study; and recommendations for use of the Expert Study findings.
• Reconceptualizing Literacy in the New Age of Multiculturalism and Pluralism. A Volume in Language, Literacy, and Learning
  The 17 chapters in this collection of papers include: (1) "Frameworks for Understanding Multicultural Literacies" (Georgia Earnest Garcia and Arlette Ingram Sillis); (2) "Multicultural Belief: A Global or Domain-Specific Construct? An Analysis of Four Case Studies" (Jyotsna Pattnaik); (3) "Monocultural Literacy: The Power of Print, Pedagogy, and Epistemological Blindness" (Dawnene D. Hammerberg and Carl Grant); (4) "Liberating Literacy" (Margaret C.
• Reconcilable differences? Standards-based teaching and differentiation.
  This article explains the beliefs used in differentiation technique of teaching and learning; Factors to consider regarding the difference of standards-based teaching and differentiation; Examples on the use of the approaches.
• Reflections on Multicultural Language Practices across a District and within a School
  Describes the school climate, the building-level specifics, and some effective teaching strategies that make Western Hills Elementary School an appropriate and successful setting for the development of multicultural language practices. Discusses the partnership between the school district and the University of Colorado at Boulder, and the role this partnership plays in supporting the development of multicultural language practices.
• Reinvesting in teachers: Aligning district professional development spending to support a comprehensive school reform strategy.District Issues Brief.
  Analyzes professional development spending in four urban districts to assist district leaders in planning and developing a professional development strategy that supports the implementation of comprehensive school reform designs.
• Reporting on Teacher Quality:The Politics of Politics.
  Critiques of Secretary of Education Rod Paige’s report to Congress on the status of teacher quality in the nation, Meeting the Highly Qualified Teachers Challenge. Analysis - secretary’s report ignores empirical evidence that contradicts its recommendations.
• Scholarship in teaching: An imperative for the 21st century.
  Outlines an organizational infrastructure needed to support scholars in education.
• School district spending on professional development: Insights available from National Data (1992-1998).
  Analysis provides new insights into the amount U.S. school districts spend on teacher professional development.
• School Violence and Disruption: Rhetoric, Reality, and Reasonable Balance
  This article examines issues related to school violence and disruption. It discusses the sociocultural context within which school violence occurs, balancing educational rights within an orderly school environment, and the role of students with disabilities in school suspensions.
• School, family, and community partnerships: Preparing educators, and improving schools
  Examines how teachers and administrators can prepare themselves to create positive relationships and productive partnerships with families and communities.
• Schools on move : Stories of Urban Schools Engaged in Inclusive Journeys of Change(Kepner Middle School in Denver, Colorado)
  This story depicts school in the midst of exciting changes and renewal. Through the voices of parents, students, teachers, and administrators, this School on the Move is making fundamental and enduring changes in the work of schools and in the results that such changes make in the lives of children and youth.
• Schools on move: Stories of Urban Schools Engaged in Inclusive Journeys of Change(Benito Martinez Elementary, El Paso, TX) .
  The Office of Special Education Programs (OSEP), U.S. Department of Education, funds the National Institute for Urban School Improvement to facilitate the unification of current general and special education reform efforts as these are implemented in the nation’s urban school districts.
• Schools on move: Stories of Urban Schools Engaged in Inclusive Journeys of Change(JC Nalle Elementary School in Washington, DC).
  This story depicts a school in the midst of exciting changes and renewal. Through the voices of parents, students, teachers, and administrators, this School on the Move is making fundamental and enduring changes in the work of schools and in the results that such changes make in the lives of children and youth.
• Secondary school curricula issues: impact on postsecondary students with disabilities.
  This article presents an overview of issues surrounding standards-based curricula and individualized education for youth with disabilities in secondary school settings.
• Secondary Transition of Multicultural Learners: Lessons from the Navajo Native American Experience
  This discussion of the impact of culture and cultural differences on school and work and the importance of enhancing multicultural awareness also reports on a study that evaluated the experience of 22 Navajo Native Americans high school graduates in transition. Findings stress the importance of students' significant relationships, limited educational and vocational perceptions, and connection to homeland and culture.
• Service-Learning and Multicultural/Multiethnic Perspectives: From Diversity to Equity
  The "missionary ideology" underlying much of the service- learning movement results from decisions to "do good things" for others. However, this movement sometimes ignores recipients' voices and what they, particularly communities of color, might have to offer.
• Shaping Teachers' Minds: Reflections on Cultural Discourse
  This paper highlights certain cultural models that have been effective in swaying culturally inexperienced teachers to reflect upon their attitudes and biases toward culture and literacy. It presents the actual reflections of student teachers as they respond to learning about cultural models of learning and discourse that may differ from their own.
• Sharing Our Pathways: A Newsletter of the Alaska Rural Systemic Initiative, 2001
  This document contains the five issues of "Sharing Our Pathways" published in 2001. This newsletter of the Alaska Rural Systemic Initiative (AKRSI) documents efforts to make Alaska rural education--particularly science education--more culturally relevant to Alaska Native students.
• Skilled Dialogue
  When we interact with students, whether to assess or to instruct, we are in dialogue with them; that is, we are transmitting and exchanging meaning across the boundaries of their identities and our own. Skilled Dialogue© is a relational approach to communication and interactions that stems from the evidence-based premise that three qualities characterize cultural competence: respect, reciprocity, and responsiveness.
• Sociocultural Considerations in Social Skills Training Research with African American Students with Emotional or Behavioral Disorders.
  Students with emotional or behavioral disorders (EBD) often have been identified on the basis of their social competence deficits. The overrepresentation of African American students in special education programs for EBD has been recognized for decades.
• Standing at the crossroads: multicultural teacher education at the beginning of the 21st century
  Analysis of research basis for college- and university-based training of teachers on multi-cultural education.
• Standing Ovations and Profound Learning: Cultural Diversity in Theatre
  Describes the profound learning that took place at the International Children's Theatre Festival in Toyama City, Japan in July 2000. Argues that participation by the Japanese-American Drama Ensemble, a youth group from the public schools in Lexington, Massachusetts, and more than 400 children from all over the planet, showcased the cultural diversity that should be taught in the theater.
• Strategies for improving professional development: A guide for school districts.
  Guide explained how school districts can review current professional development programs and policies and realign them into a coherent system.
• Strengthening the linkages between schools and families of children with disabilities.
  Challenges the assumptions long held by professionals about the attitudes, roles, emotional adjustments, needs, strength and competence of families of students with disabilities.
• Students With Disabilities and Paraprofessional Supports: Benefits, Balance, and Band-Aids
  This article discusses the increasing use of paraprofessionals in special education and addresses the following five areas: the role of paraprofessionals, the impact of the proximity of paraprofessionals on students with disabilities, the impact of paraprofessionals on teacher engagement, the importance of professional recognition, and strategies for improving paraprofessional support.
• Teacher Effectiveness and Computer Assessment of Reading:Relating Value Added and Learning Information System Data.
  Discusses data from the Tennessee Value-Added Assessment System, the largest longitudinally merged database of student achievement data in the US. Illuminated some factors in teacher management of the quality and quantity of student reading practice.
• Teacher Quality: Excellence
  Teacher quality is at the top of the education policy agenda touching off heated debates not only among educators and parents but government agencies, business and industry, and private foundations and organizations as well. Issues being debated include teacher pay and incentives, school staffing and autonomy, improved teacher preparation from universities, and induction and mentoring of new teachers into the profession.
• Teacher retention, teacher effectiveness, and professional preparation: A comparison of professional developmnet school and non-professional development school graduates
  Compared Professional Development School (PDS) and non-PDS graduates regarding retention in teaching, teaching effectiveness, and perceptions of professional preparation. Surveys of beginning teachers and principals found no differences in teacher retention.
• Teacher temporal orientation and management of urban school reform and change process.
  Recommendations and strategies for enhancing classroom teacher participation in urban school reform activities are presented.
• Teachers engaged in evidence-based reform: Trajectories of teacher’s inquiry, analysis, and action.
  Summarizes the results of a study of the Bay Area School Reform Collaborative in which teachers used the inquiry process as a means for learning and changing their school and classroom practices.
• Teachers wanted
  Discusses the shortage of teachers and efforts to recruit them in the United States as of fall 2000. View of educators that an opportunity exits to improve American schools and the work of teachers; Issue of salaries and professional prestige; Reform in education, including the idea of a career ladder for teachers; Data on the teaching profession.
• Teachers’ developing ideas and practices about mathematics performance assessment: Successes, stumbling blocks, and implications for professional development.
  Describes the positive outcomes in how teachers align assessment and instruction through varied professional development opportunities both inside and outside the school.
• Teaching in America: The slow revolution.
  Grant and Murray describe the evolution of the teaching profession over the last hundred years, and then focus in depth on recent experiments that gave teachers the power to shape their schools and mentor young educators.
• Teaching Multicultural Counseling Prepracticum
  Focuses on the value of a multicultural counseling prepracticum course for counselors in training at Virginia Commonwealth University (Richmond). States that the course helps students develop their skills in multicultural counseling.
• Teaching the Third Culture Child
  Examines experiences of a 5- and 7-year-old entering a U.S. early childhood program in context of child development theory, constructivist philosophy, and the Japanese social teaching model.
• The building Leadership team
  A Building Leadership Team (BLT) is a school-based group of individuals who work to provide strong organizational process for school renewal and improvement. BLTs orchestrate the work of school professionals, administrators, families, and students through the school improvement process.
• The Effect of Site-Based Preservice Experiences on Elementary Social Studies Teaching Self-Efficacy Beliefs
  This study assessed the effectiveness of a site-based teacher education program for undergraduate seniors at the University of Houston. The program's final field-based year is divided into a professional development semester and student teaching.
• The effects of a study-group process on the implementation of reform in mathematics education.
  Three consecutive year study of 48 elementary school teachers. Surveys, interviews, and site visits showed that teachers underwent significant changes in their knowledge, beliefs, and teaching practices.
• The Impact of a professional development school on preservice teacher preparation, inservice teachers' professionalism, and children's achievement: perceptions of inservice teachers
  
• The impact of professional development schools on the education of urban students
  Professional development schools (PDSs) were originated a decade ago to provide a new model for teacher education that enables graduate students to have meaningful classroom experiences while they earn their degree. Over 1,000 PDSs exist in nearly every state, operating as partnerships between universities and public schools; most belong to one of many national or regional networks.
• The Multicultural Factor in Making Decisions
  This paper summarizes a south Asian custom of decision-making and a western custom of decision-making. It then describes by example the meeting of these customs, based on traditional philosophies (one supporting an entire family group, the other leaving a person to function individually and independently), when a newcomer (an Indian male graduate student) from the family-oriented philosophy enters a host culture of the individual and independent philosophy.
• The Process of Culture Learning within a Foreign Language Program at a Selected Suburban Middle School Site: A Case Study
  This paper examines the effect of foreign language instruction on middle school students' attitudes toward "the other." The primary purpose of this case study is to describe the process of culture learning as it takes place within a middle school foreign language program. Culture learning is a particular type of human learning related to the patterns of human interaction and identification that can be viewed in one of three ways: (1) a series of stages along a road to the development of intercultural communicative skills; (2) a path or continuum leading from ethnocentrism; and (3) as varying stages of awareness, understanding, and acceptance.
• The Reflective Principal
  This booklet was developed as part of the activities of the Principal’s Project, a federally funded grant from the U.S. Department of Education, Office of Special Education Programs.
• The Relationship Between Teacher Effectiveness and Teacher Attitudes Toward Issues Related to Inclusion
  The inclusion of students with special needs in regular education classrooms has become a major focus of current educational reform, and regular education teacher's acceptance is a critical component in how this type of service delivery will play out.
• The Research Base for Teacher Education: Metaphors We Live (and Die)
  Editorial of research based teacher preparation practices. Analysis – conclusions about the research base for teacher education are often dependent on different assumptions in the first place about teaching, learning, and schooling.
• The return of large-scale reform.
  Reviews three "types" of large-scale reforms and the emerging lessons being learned. Whole school district reform involving all schools in a district; whole school reform in which hundreds of schools attempt to implement particular models of change, and; state or national initiatives in which all or most of the schools in the state are involved.
• The Role of Empathy in Teaching Culturally Diverse Students: A Qualitative Study of Teachers' Beliefs
  Investigated teachers' beliefs about the role of empathy in their effectiveness with culturally diverse students. All respondents had participated in a multicultural professional development course geared to fostering culturally responsive practice.
• The Role of Empathy in Teaching Culturally Diverse Students: A Qualitative Study of Teachers' Beliefs.
  Provides a description of 34 practicing teachers' beliefs regarding the role of empathy as an attribute in their effectiveness with culturally diverse students. Results underscore the importance of creating contexts in teacher education and professional development programs for teachers and pre-service teachers to use and nurture empathetic dispositions and behaviors.
• The role of the district: Professional learning and district reform.
  Three-year study examined how four school districts (two American and two Canadian) organized, managed and pushed for professional development as a broader district level reform strategy to improve teaching and learning.
• The School Improvement Process
  The School Improvement Process can help school communities to develop an information system to guide the improvement of services to all students and their families. This process engages families and students in new roles as active participants and leaders in the process.
• The theoretical foundations of professional development in special education: Is socio-cultural theory enough?
  Focuses on the relevance and contributions of socio-cultural theory and multicultural and critical pedagogies to professional development in special education. Vignettes illustrating such dilemmas, with reference to the 1998 Council for Exceptional Children professional standards, are presented.
• The Unity Project: Creating a Circle of Awareness
  Research on school restructuring reveals the commitments and competencies that lead to improved outcomes for children, including careful attention to students' emotional development, professional development that emphasizing the reflective study of teaching, culturally responsive and inclusive teaching, and a focus on early language and literacy instruction.
• The Use and Role of Multiethnic Children's Literature in Family Literacy Programs: Realities and Possibilities
  Reviews the recent professional literature on family literacy programs, with a focus on the use and role of children's literature, specifically multiethnic texts, within those programs. Describes children's literature in family literacy and discusses the role of multiethnic literature in family literature.
• Time use flows from school culture.
  School leaders must learn to read the culture and focus staff development on cultural issues affecting how people use time. This paper discusses cultures that nurture and wound and describes how to shape more nurturing cultures.
• Tools of Exclusion: Race, Disability, and (Re)segregated Education.
  This article we explore the dynamic interplay between racism discrimination against someone based on perceived "ability”in the resistance to school desegregation and inclusion of students with disabilities in general education. In attending to the workings of power that connect these two histories, we show how racialized notions of ability functioned to uphold segregated schooling and justify the use of special education as a tool of racial resegregation.
• Topics on Distance Learning: Proceedings 2000 (Hammond, Indiana, June 6-7, 2000). Corp Author(s): Purdue Univ., Hammond, IN. Calumet Campus. Publication: U.S.; Indiana; 2000-00-00 Description: 6 p
  This is a proceeding of the 2000 Topics on Distance Learning conference.
• Toward a conception of culturally responsive classroom management
  Discussion of culturally responsive classroom management (CRCM).Propose a conception of CRCM that includes five essential components: (a) recognition of one’s own ethnocentrism; (b) knowledge of students’ cultural backgrounds; (c) understanding of the broader social, economic, and political context; (d) ability and willingness to use culturally appropriate management strategies; and (e) commitment to building caring classrooms.
• Transformative Training: A Year-Long Multicultural Counseling Seminar for Graduate Students
  Describes a year-long multicultural training seminar for psychology and social work interns in a university counseling center. Discusses the experiential, cross-disciplinary, peer-based multiformat structure of the group.
• Understanding Culture
  Understanding culture is critical for educators because our individual cultural orientation is present in every interaction. Too often, we make assumptions about a person?s beliefs or behaviors based on a single cultural indicator, particularly race1 or ethnicity, when in reality, our cultural identities are a complex weave of all the cultural groups we belong to that influence our values, beliefs, and behaviors.
• Use time for faculty study.
  Discusses advantages to the whole-faculty study-group process, which involves small groups that meet regularly to focus on some area of educational improvement. Includes guidelines and concludes that study groups can help teachers accomplish together what they are already expected to do.
• Using emerging technologies to help bridge the gap between university theory and classroom practice: challenges and successes.
  Describes the challenges that the authors faced as they integrated a web-supported professional development system into elementary science methods courses. Provides recommendations concerning the implementation of a web-based professional development system into elementary methods science courses and describes what appear to be successful strategies for fostering a collaborative atmosphere between teacher educators, pre-service teachers, and in-service teachers.
• Variation in Teacher Preparation: How Well Do Different Pathways Prepare Teachers To Teach?
  Examines data from a 1998 survey of nearly 3000 beginning teachers in New York City regarding their views of their preparation for teaching, their beliefs and practice, and their plans to remain in teaching. Findings indicate that teachers who were prepared in teacher education programs felt significantly better prepared across most dimensions of teaching than those who entered teaching through alternative programs or without preparation.
• What Every Special Educator must know: Ethics ,Standards and Guidelines for Special Educators
  This is a collaborative product of the members of CEC and others in the wider educational community. The standards and principles represent the expertise and ideas of literally thousands of special educators.
• What Makes a Teacher Education Program Relevant Preparation for Teaching Diverse Students in Urban Poverty Schools? (The Milwaukee Teacher Education Center Model)
  Urban teachers need a set of attributes that enable them to connect with children and youth in poverty and to function in dysfunctional school districts. The Milwaukee Teacher Education Center's (MTEC's) urban mission is to prepare educators to teach in the real world classroom of urban schools.
• What Makes Professional Development Effective? Results From a National Sample of Teachers
  This study uses a national probability sample of 1,027 mathematics and science teachers to provide the first large-scale empirical comparison of effects of different characteristics of professional development on teachers' learning.
• What Parents of Kids with Special Needs Think About Their Child's Educational Program?
  Parents of special-needs kids have a unique perspective on the programs and services that schools provide. They know first-hand what works and doesn?t work about special education, and they are coming from a different mindset than the policy-makers and educators who design and implement special education programs.Family School Linkages Project: Building Better Relationships Between School Personnel & the Families of their Students By Anne Stilwell
  Download the document here .
• What we mean by "family and community connections with schools"?
  When some people think of family involvement, they think of parents volunteering in their child?s classroom and attending parent-teacher conferences.Family School Linkages Project: Building Better Relationships between School Personnel & the Families of their Students Research Brief November 2002 from the National Center for Family & Community Connections with Schools.
  Download the document here .
• White Mothers of Non-White Children
  Results of nine qualitative interviews with White (Pakeha) mothers of non-White children in New Zealand are provided, as are excerpts from personal narratives of biracial persons. J.