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Eric.ed.gov – Engaging Parents in Education: Lessons from Five Parental Information and Resource Centers. Innovations in Education

eric.ed.gov har udgivet: Children benefit academically when parents and educators work together. For this reason, parents’ involvement in their children’s education is a priority of the “No Child Left Behind Act of 2001.” But a strong connection between parents and educators does not come about automatically. Both parties may need to learn new roles and skills and develop the confidence to use them, especially as parents move beyond traditional activities, like helping children with homework, and toward shared responsibility for school improvement. Intermediary organizations, like federally funded Parental Information and Resource Centers (PIRCs), can help. Drawing on lessons learned from five PIRCs across the country that have been meeting this challenge, this guide shares promising strategies for increasing effective parent involvement. It explains “how to” strategies that the Parent Information… Continue Reading

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Eric.ed.gov – Strengthening Partnerships: How Communication and Collaboration Contribute to School Improvement

eric.ed.gov har udgivet: For most of the past decade, this author has studied union-management efforts to improve public education, and has witnessed extraordinary examples of teachers, union leaders, and administrators working together to improve teaching and learning. In this article, seven case studies on collaborative partnerships between teachers’ unions and administrators from districts located across the country and a mix of urban, rural, large and small schools are analyzed. He identifies themes and patterns common to all these districts: (1) Motivation for initiating collaboration; (2) Strategic priorities for improvement; (3) Supportive system infrastructures; and (4) Sustaining characteristics. Rubenstein then reports on the partnership attitude and climate survey data from the California Academic Performance Index (API), and social network analysis. The API includes standardized test results in math, English, social studies,… Continue Reading

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Eric.ed.gov – Building Capacity for Continuous Improvement of Math and Science Education in Rural Schools

eric.ed.gov har udgivet: Schools in 47 high-poverty school districts located mostly along the Atlantic Coast of North Carolina, South Carolina, and Virginia may have a head start on new requirements of the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act of 2001, thanks to a $6 million grant from the National Science Foundation. Begun in April 2000, the five-year Coastal Rural Systemic Initiative (CRSI) is striving to stimulate sustainable systemic improvements in science and mathematics education in school districts with a long history of low student expectations, persistent poverty, low teacher pay, and high administrator turnover. The CRSI capacity-building model is designed to address issues in rural school districts that traditionally limit the capacity for creating sustainable improvements in math and science programs. A critical action step is that each school district… Continue Reading

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Eric.ed.gov – Triad Simultaneous Renewal: A Marriage with Teacher Education/Science & Math and PreK-12.

eric.ed.gov har udgivet: This paper outlines how shared decision making among teacher education faculty, preK-12 educators, and the Science and Mathematics faculty at Wright State University successfully led to the preparation of quality educators. It offers a historical overview of the Wright State redesign efforts, then: examines the university’s collaboration for teacher content preparation; clarifies how learned society guidelines and state teacher performance requirements (Praxis III) are integrated into an electronic portfolio template; demonstrates the documentation of content and teaching proficiency via electronic portfolios; and presents the evaluation process used in a multi-faceted renewal project. It describes: the university-school district partnership agreement; the Professional Educator Program (the culmination of the college’s efforts to be a collaborative partner in teacher preparation and professional development of K-12 practitioners); lessons learned; experiences using… Continue Reading

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Eric.ed.gov – Listen to Us: Teacher Views and Voices

eric.ed.gov har udgivet: Education policymakers and leaders often say that the opinions and observations of teachers are among the most important information to help explain and understand what is happening in schools. Teachers’ voices can inject a sense of classroom and school-level realism into those discussions and add clarity and credibility to issues that are often clouded by competing interests. The Center on Education Policy (CEP), in an effort to gather and amplify teachers’ voices about current education issues and their own profession, conducted a national survey of public school K-12 teachers in the winter of 2015-16. The survey focused on a strategic set of issues for policymakers, educators, business leaders, and the public, including teachers’ views on their profession, standards, testing, and evaluations. The nationally representative sample surveyed for… Continue Reading