Academies of Inquiry and Talent Development at the Middle and High School Levels1
This article summarizes research on various aspects of the Schoolwide Enrichment Triad Model and research on eight categorical components of the model carried out over the past 20 years will be presented. These components include: the effectiveness of the model, creative productivity, personal and social development, unhabits, and perhaps most important, love of learning and desire to continue to pursue creative productive work in the future.
Schools for Talent Development: A Practical Plan for Total School Improvement
If leaders of educational reform can agree on only one thing, it is that remedial models for school improvement have failed. Attempts to push up achievement test scores from the bottom through highly prescriptive mastery learning models have frustrated low-achieving students and dragged down the performance of average and high-achieving youngsters. An alternative to the “drill-and-kill” approach is an enrichment-based model that uses high end learning strategies and accelerated content to improve the performance of all students. The Schoolwide Enrichment Model, developed by the Center for Talent Development at the University of Connecticut, is a detailed blueprint for total school improvement. Flexible enough to allow each school to form its own program based on local resources, student populations, school leadership dynamics, faculty strengths, and creativity, this researchsupported model is based on highly successful practices that had their origins in special programs for gifted and talented students. Its major goal is to promote challenging and enjoyable high-end learning across the full range of school types, levels, and demographic differences.
Learning to Teach against the Grain
Can prospective teachers learn to be both educators and activists, to regard themselves as agents for change, and to regard reform as an integral part of the social, intellectual, ethical, and political activity of teaching? In this article, Marilyn Cochran-Smith argues that a powerful way for student teachers to learn to reform teaching, or what she refers to as teaching against the grain, is to work in the company of experienced teachers who are themselves struggling to be reformers in their own classrooms, schools, and communities.Cochran-Smith analyzes two approaches to preparing preservice teachers to teach against the grain, proposing that differences between them can be understood as the result of different underlying assumptions about knowledge, power, and language in teaching. By analyzing conversations among student teachers and experienced teachers in four urban schools, the author explores the nature of reformers' intellectual perspectives on teaching and demonstrates that regular school-site ...