Results-Based Professional Development Models
This text provides all the tools professional developers need to introduce and implement five models: coaching/mentoring, independent study, inquiry, process, and training. The use of these models supports the purpose of ensuring that every educator engages in effective professional development every day so every student achieves.

Collegial Conversations Viewing Guide
Use this viewing guide in conjunction with Just ASK's Collegial Conversations DVD. Developed in 2008 by Brenda Kaylor, it explains how to use the five clips featured in the DVD to support the learning of mentors. The purpose, context, and content and coaching look-fors for each clip are described in-depth. Also listed are recommended resources to enrich the viewing and professional learning of mentors.

Standards-Based Classroom Self-Inventory
You can’t get to where you want to go unless you know where you’ve been and where you are right now. A mutual understanding of the content standards and standards-based teaching and learning is a critical foundation for increasing student learning. This self-inventory helps you analyze where you are in terms of curriculum, instruction, assessment, and student learning using points on a continuum that describe classrooms in transition to ideal classrooms based on standards. Complete the self-inventory to find out where your practice and your students are on the continuum.

Essential Roles and Responsibilities
Standards-Based Education (SBE) only works well when everyone in the system is focused on doing everything necessary to ensure that all students are learning at high levels. This tool describes how all members of the SBE system might do their work. As an individual, use this tool for self-assessment and goal setting. Groups may use it to start conversations, discussions, and dialogues about how different roles support SBE.

Differentiation in the 21^st Century Classroom
This article, by Paula Rutherford, was published in the March 2005 edition of Instructional Leader, the journal of the Texas Elementary Principals and Supervisors Association (TEPSA). It discusses how educators need to abandon the “search for a quick fix” regarding student learning and instead ensure that the attitudes, skills, and knowledge of content, learning theory, and repertoire are in place so that teachers can use their repertoires to differentiate instruction in productive ways.

Leading the Learning
This article was published in the September/October 2006 issue of Leadership, the journal of the Association of California School Administrators (ACSA). Paula Rutherford lists the essential variables school leaders need to address in order to promote teacher growth and student learning in the 21^st century. She emphasizes that administrators need to use the standards-based planning process to design interactions with staff that, in turn, will promote teacher growth and student learning. Recommended resources to supplement each variable are also discussed.


Just for the ASKing!
e-Newsletter Archives by Focus Area
Designed to help you get more out of our widely popular e-newsletter, each issue of Just for the ASKing! has been arranged into one or more focus areas. Now you can find all issues that pertain to instructional leadership, creating a culture for learning, supervision and evaluation, best practice in instruction, assessment, meeting the needs of diverse learners, as well as certain issues that are motivational or thought provoking.