NASSP Bulletin

Teachers need self-assessment and reflection tools to help them assess fundamental beliefs and assumptions about learning, learners, and teaching, as well as differences between their perceptions of practice and those held by students in their classroom. A process of reflection will help to identify the personal characteristics and practices that must change to improve motivation and achievement for each student.

Although Hispanic students are following a more rigorous curriculum than they were a decade ago, those who are migratory are more likely than their Anglo peers to face a disorderly school environment. The exemplary programs outlined here appear to provide a structure that promotes consistent learning and allows Hispanic students to organize their new knowledge.

There is a place in secondary teaching for the traditional lecture and there is a place for the Socratic Method. Students learn from questions and not only from answers. They learn from being asked to justify their positions, to support their arguments with logic and with evidence.

We are not helping students acquire the strategic reading skills they will need to cope with the ever-increasing demands of the market place. Administrators, teachers, and parents need to make literacy a top priority and reading skills must be incorporated into courses across the curriculum.

Instructional strategies are powerful tools that are directly related to teacher expectations and student achievement. Many schools can increase both teacher expectations and student achievement by putting theory into practice.

Service learning integrates service into student instruction and learn ing. It promotes personal, social, and intellectual growth; develops a sense of civic responsibility; provides opportunities for leadership; and prepares students for the world of work. Employing service learning activities in middle level schools allows students to help others white involving them in activities that contribute to their learning.

The school—from preschool through twelfth grade—is a more complex form of community than the family. As students' capabilities and need to learn increase, they should practice operating in increasingly com plex environments. But such environments should still provide stu dents with greater stability and direction than most adult non-family environments. Such support groups often now include homerooms.

The curriculum-writing experiences of teachers have not always been positive. Without a comprehensive framework for curriculum develop ment the hours of toil often result in a hybrid conglomeration of activi ties that does little to enhance the teaching and learning process in any meaningful way. Here is a brief overview of a model that invites teach ers who want to write curriculum into the process of curriculum design.

Most school administrators, teachers, and parents are concerned about our society's negative influences on children's intellectual develop ment. There is widespread worry about the impact of television, movies, video games, computer games, and other related activities. How do these environmental factors affect young people's intellectual development?

Factors That May Have Contributed to Decreased Test Performance in British Columbia's Block Scheduled Schools

Learning is the core purpose, the quintessential mission of schools and schooling. Learning and its sundry issues also present problems and questions for school leaders: Who can learn? What can they learn? How should opportunities for learning be structured? To whom should such opportunities be directed? These questions are fundamental to the issue of inclusion in schools.

It can be difficult to initiate and implement educational reform, espe cially instructional reform, in a traditional high school. Many obstacles must be overcome to achieve success: the departmentalization of the curriculum, beliefs about student ability, and beliefs about content and preparation for further learning.

For school principals, an ongoing challenge in the evolution of technology is the cost/benefit ratio—how to get the most from each expenditure, how to structure the environment to equitably serve the largest number of students, how to effectively match software designs with curriculum goals, and how to motivate and equip teachers to link technological capacities with improved student learning.