There is a growing consensus among many states that standards for accreditation of teacher preparation programs, initial licensing for teachers, and advanced certification for veteran teachers should be aligned. Rules and tests that govern teacher certification have little to do with true classroom…

Survey respondents were asked to rate the importance of 31 higher education issues, using a five-point scale of '1' equaling "not important" to '5' equaling "very important." Respondents were directed to consider the importance of these issues for the state overall, not simply to reflect their own…

The American high school has been a remarkably resilient institution, maintaining its basic structure even as its mission and the world around it have experienced dramatic transformations. One hundred years ago, only about 10 percent of adolescents enrolled in high school, which served then as a…

Site-based management can be defined as the formal alteration of school governance arrangements. Site-based management is a form of decentralization. Site-based management has three distinctive features: (1) Some formal authority to make decisions in the central domains of budget, personnel and…

A college education has become an essential part of the American Dream for millions of families. Indeed, extensive polling and focus group research conducted by our coalition of higher education associations in the last year clearly demonstrates that the public overwhelmingly believes higher…

A college education increases your child’s ability to think critically, advance in a career, contribute to the community and better understand the world. No wonder choosing the right college is such an important task. Your child and you must carefully consider the many aspects of a college –…

Greetings! If read in sequence the following quotes are generally arranged to be a conversation across the ages on a topic. Use for your syllabi, your exams, to start a class discussion, or to enliven your day. The Nature of Education Edith Hamilton To be able to be caught up into the world…

The selection of teaching methods and strategies must be based, to some extent, on your own teaching preferences and unique style. Remember, however, that students learn in many different ways, and some research suggests that their learning preferences are substantively different from those of the…

Every time you ask a question in class, monitor a student discussion, or read a term paper, you are evaluating learning. Moreover, the evaluation process (whether it involves examinations or not) is a valuable part of the teaching process. The primary purpose of evaluation is to provide corrective…

Many college teachers use a simple, content-centered planning model. By contrast, the planning model presented in this section focuses on the student rather than on the content. The operative planning questions are: - In what ways will students be better thinkers when they finish the…

Through a liberal education students acquire frames of reference and the ability to analyze and reflect that influence how they view their experience and how they choose to behave. If this is a desired outcome of a liberal education, how can we as educators help students achieve it? A number of…

The teacher-led discussion is used in college classrooms to help students develop a deeper understanding of course material and practice basic thinking skills. This type of discussion fits easily into lecture courses and is often employed in separate discussion sections for large classes. Although…

What is good teaching? Who is a good teacher? The search for the answers to these questions has become for teacher education a search for an educational Holy Grail. While appearing to be deceptively simple and seductively straightforward, these questions have instigated an enduring and…

Service-learning, the newest name for a teaching strategy that has been used successfully for many years, integrates community service into a traditional academic curriculum. Courses that have a service component can help students connect material learned in class and experiences acquired in their…

Setting high standards for student learning is important, but if we are to attain true excellence in our schools, we must have even higher expectations for teachers. Traditional preparation and certification programs are failing to provide sufficient quality and are deterring many talented…

Now is the time to begin a focused discussion of education reform at the national level and that this discussion should be rooted in an appreciation of and understanding of the reform successes among the states. Washington, in other words, can learn a great deal from what has happened to education…

As a shortage of teachers grows toward crisis proportions, the nation's schools are struggling against twin burdens to hire well-prepared new teachers and to keep them from leaving the profession. Many schools, particularly those in urban areas, have turned to formal programs of training and support…

Have you ever asked yourself what a manual volume damper (MVD) actually is? I started asking hundreds of people in the HVAC/R industry, including air-balance technicians, this question. I received the same answer from 99 percent of the people I asked: “A manual volume damper is a device installed in…

Custom course packs give university instructors enormous freedom in course design. Unlike traditional textbooks, course packs can take any shape, and can be tailored to fit almost any subject matter, teaching method, or educational goal. These qualities, combined with their reasonable cost, make…

As teachers, we tend to present material to our classes in the form of the results of our discipline's work. We collect the data, do the reading and synthesize the material into a finished product. Students, in their assignments and exams, are generally expected to demonstrate that they have learned…

One of the major challenges in supporting the scholarship of teaching on campus or in the disciplines, is to encourage not just those individuals who are interested in pursuing such work, but to help develop the field itself. We aim to explore the ways in which the scholarship of teaching might…