NEW!
3/29/2008

BUILD COMMUNITY PARTNERSHIPS: STRENGTHEN OUT-OF-SCHOOL PROGRAMS
Increasing community involvement in out-of-school programs has the potential to create significant benefits for the communities they serve. The partnerships satisfy a wide variety of needs, such as improving recruitment and attendance and contributing volunteers and other resources. This Child Trends brief discusses how community involvement can become a crucial factor for out-of-school programs and describes how programs can identify valuable community resources and develop strategies for leveraging community support.

NEW!
3/14/2008

IMPROVE STUDENT ACHIEVEMENT: FOCUS ON THE INDIVIDUAL
Current school improvement practices present an inadequate response to the complex factors that interfere with positive development, learning and teaching, argues a new paper from the University of California at Los Angeles Center for Mental Health in Schools. A major problem is that recent policies perpetuate narrow-focused, categorical approaches. These methods must be revised to promote an orientation that overemphasizes individually prescribed services. It follows that school improvement policies should be expanded to support development of the type of comprehensive, multifaceted and cohesive approaches that effectively address all barriers to teaching and learning. This includes a fundamental, systemic transformation in the ways schools, families and communities address individual barriers. In addition, the paper provides frameworks to guide school improvement efforts in transforming student/learning supports at both the school and district level.

NEW!
2/15/2008

A SCHOOL SYSTEM THAT RETAINS GOOD TEACHERS WITH LOVE, NOT MONEY
While education research can find a way to disagree about almost everything, the totality of research supports the assertion that well trained, proficient and effective teachers produce student learning, writes Henry and Rosemary Wong for Teachers.net Gazette. Nevertheless, each year schools spend $7.3 billion recruiting and hiring the same new teachers to replace the same teachers hired the year before. The new teachers are all given mentors, yet the attrition rate remains stable and student learning does not improve. To stop this recurring detrimental cycle, Hopewell (Va.) City Schools offer support and quality staff development to new hires. Hopewell provides vital activities that help new hires get the training they need, including: four days of orientation and workshops; a field trip around the community; and, a welcome breakfast hosted by the Chamber of Commerce, among other activities. A study done by Richard Ingersoll at the University of Pennsylvania has found that teachers in districts that do what Hopewell is doing are less likely to drop out. In fact, a teacher’s chance of dropping out is only 18 percent when these sorts of supports are in place, meaning four out of five hires remain. As a result of Hopewell’s efforts, teachers return there after leaving for what they thought would be happiness and more money.

NEW!
1/18/2008

Raising Critical Thinkers
Identifying fact versus fiction on the Internet is an important measure of critical thinking for today's learners. Discover what educators across the U.S. and in other countries are doing to develop this skill and effectively integrate web research into the classroom.

"Doing What Works is a website dedicated to helping educators identify and
make use of effective teaching practices. Doing What Works contains practice
guides developed by the Department¹s Institute for Education Sciences that
evaluate research on the effectiveness of teaching practices described in
the guides. The website also contains examples of possible ways this
research may be used, but not necessarily the only ways to implement these
teaching practices."

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NEW!
12/21/2007

TO BE A GOOD TEACHER, LEARN TO BE A GOOD MOTIVATOR
The Association for Childhood Education International (ACEI) has released a new research brief that focuses on the complex nature of learning. The paper asserts that learning as a process must be redefined and that today’s educational practices require a superior understanding of the role motivation plays in learning. Broadly, the paper addresses the challenges educators face when working with students that are disinterested, reluctant or particularly resistant to certain tasks. ACEI concludes that learning relies on a range of key motivational strategies, which include student- and task-specific rewards. In addition to focusing on the importance of motivation in promoting learning, the brief provides research-based recommendations to help teachers improve their ability to reach students and help them learn.
http://www.acei.org/motivPosPaper.pdf

NEW!
5/18/2007

GETTING SERIOUS ABOUT PLAY AS A LEARNING TOOL IN CLASSROOMS
For Georgianne Walsh, of New Jersey, a beloved raccoon puppet known as Chester acts as the official greeter for her kindergarten students every morning. Amy Wallace, who teaches in New York City, created a puppet named Maya about whom her first graders became so concerned that Wallace purchased a tent for her to sleep in at night. In Las Cruces, N.M. Toni Gross's preschoolers are endlessly intrigued by a mouth-shaped puppet named Besos she uses to demonstrate oral movement when teaching speech and language. These puppets, simple hinged paper devices, were all inspired by an innovative website called Puppetools.com. Brainchild of a boundary-busting educator named Jeffrey Peyton, Puppetools provides a wide array of resources designed to introduce teachers and students to a stimulating world of educational play centered on puppetry. "When play enters the classroom, it transforms everything," says Peyton. "And when the play involves puppets, the power opens up and moves into the hands of the students." This is a man who is serious about play. Peyton feels that the whole concept has been marginalized in public education, mostly because so many teachers are intimidated by it, writes Burr Snider in Edutopia magazine. "The idea of communicating playfully using a device like a puppet is just too far out for most adults, and I think that speaks volumes about the classroom environment," Peyton says. "Lots of teachers strive for standardized behavior, and I think children sense this deeply and suffer from it, from prekindergarten on into high school."

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INVESTOR ED 101: BEST CLASSROOM TOOLS
If you are a teacher who has had a hard time finding quality investor education content for your middle school or high school classroom, your search is over! The nonprofit Alliance for Investor Education (AIE) today is highlighting ten of the best available investor education classroom resources for teachers and students. AIE is a 22-member organization of the United States’ leading financial-related foundations, nonprofit organizations, associations and governmental agencies

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FREE HIGH-QUALITY TEACHING & LEARNING RESOURCES
The Institute for the Study of Knowledge Management in Education has just released OER Commons, the first comprehensive open learning network that enables users to find freely available high-quality teaching and learning materials. Created with and for educators, students, and self-learners, this broad selection of open educational resources for K-12 and higher education can be browsed, searched, and enhanced using collaborative social networking features, such as tags, ratings, and reviews. The goal of OER Commons is to bring innovation to teachers and learners around the world.

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EDUCATION LEADERSHIP POLICY TOOLKIT NOW AVAILABLE
The Education Commission of the States (ECS) announces the release of the Education Leadership Policy Toolkit, a comprehensive online toolkit that provides information on effective education leadership policies and practices. The toolkit was created through the generous support of MetLife Foundation and is designed to provide information to state policymakers and school district leaders -- as well as principals and teachers -- with the goal of increasing leadership capacity in schools, districts and states. Information on the site was gathered and synthesized from a series of case studies conducted around the nation in districts with strong student learning, often in challenging contexts. The Education Leadership Policy Toolkit organizes information into eight key categories that represent the common leadership factors in all the studied districts: Vision, Governance, Relationships, Culture, Human Development, Instruction, Evaluation and Resource Allocation. Within each category, users can find example policies and practices, recommendations and key elements of effective leadership at three different levels: state, district and school.

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BEST PRACTICES CENTER