A Letter from the Editor

Through collegial planning, materials and teaching practices were developed that were effectively aligned with the particular teachers and students. It might be argued that such alignment could only have been achieved through a collegial approach. In their article that describes a more refined approach to understanding "what it means to know a word" (p. 59), Gina Cervetti, Jennifer L.Tilson, Jill Castek, Marco A. Bravo, and Guy Trainin trace the development of a measure designed to assess multiple types of word knowledge. The study is a continuation of their work with science educators to develop science units that "treat vocabulary knowledge as conceptual knowledge" (p. 49), and "offer[s] teachers and curriculum designers useful examples that can inform vocabulary instruction and assessment more broadly" (p. 49). This research is an exemplar of the increasing trend for content and literacy educators to collaborate in the vital task of ensuring students' success in becoming literate in the academic disciplines. Diane Corcoran Nielsen and her school-based co-researchers, Lisa Dinner Friesen and Judy Fink, worked together to develop and implement an intervention with a group of high-poverty, urban kindergarten children, whose standardized test scores revealed them to be significantly behind their peers in language development. Their dual focus on vocabulary and narrative development at an early critical stage of school-based literacy learning is particularly significant. The promising outcomes of their classroom intervention support the value of a team of researchers that includes practitioners. Lisa D' Souza s case study of a beginning teacher that began in the final year of teacher education and continued through the first four years of her career as a high school teacher offers a report of a different type of collegiality, an effort centered on guided inquiry of formative assessment to inform teaching practices. This work was part of a larger university-school collaboration in an urban school setting. In a different context, for a different purpose, the promise of collegiality is again validated. In the next article, Matthew E. Lemberger, Greg Brigman, Linda Webb, and Molly M. Moore describe their theory of cognitive and social change and the ways this theory informs a project that is intended to help students to acquire research-validated "success skills" that are required for academic and social success. The "dialectic conversational model" (p. 91) was designed to be implemented in both classroom and group counseling sessions within a student-focused learning environment. In this work, the In his book, Improving Schools from Within: Teachers, Parents , and Principals Can Make the Difference , published in 1990, Dr. Roland S. Barth, who founded the Principals' Center at the Harvard Graduate School of Education more than thirty years ago, reminds us of "the fundamental purpose of schooling learning, for everyone" (p. xv).To this end, he suggests that the promise of reform resides within the school, and can be accomplished by a spirit of "collegiality" (p. xi) that calls upon the "energy, inventiveness and idealism within the schoolhouse" (p. xiv). Decades later, in this double issue of the Journal of Education on the theme Schools and Schooling , the value of collegiality among those concerned with improving the quality of schooling resonates in the Special Section, edited by Dean Hardin Coleman, and in the articles in the main section. The intent of the Special Section, as Dean Coleman's letter suggests, is to offer an opportunity to reflect upon "the relationship between educational research and the practice of education" (p. 1). The Special Section is introduced with a letter from Dean Coleman followed by a collective case study of four schools that were awarded the Thomas W. Payzant School on the Move Prize. The case study is the work of Chad d 'Entremont and his colleagues at the Rennie Center for Education Research and Policy: Jill Norton, Michael Bennett, and Peter Piazza. Their article is followed by a report of a structural analysis conducted by Alan Kibbe Gaynor who offers insights into the type of school reform that will benefit all students, including those who are now denied the opportunity to realize their promise. Because of the remarkable similarity of the findings derived from these two different approaches, we invited the authors to reflect on their own work in relation to the