New Releases by MADELINE HUNTER

A young woman in 14th century England is sold into indentured servitude.

As punishment for a romantic indiscretion, Lady Christiana is forced to marry a common merchant. But when she meets David de Abyndon, she finds he is no ordinary merchant but a man of extraordinary poise and virility. She senses the most uncompromising of passions behind his cool blue eyes.

Addis de Valence returns from the Crusades determined to wed and bed the "bondswoman" who raised his motherless son for eight years, but the lovely Moira is not about to submit to his slavery without a fight. Original.

This study of ''transfer'' addresses the perplexing question: How can students possess knowledge and skills in one set of circumstances and yet not be able to apply those same skills to other situations that require them? Madeline Hunter introduces four factors designed to aid the process of transfer and promote creativity and problem-solving techniques among students: similarity, association, degree of original learning, and critical attributes.

The elements which influence a student''s rate and degree of learning are outlined in this volume. Madeline Hunter demonstrates a diversity of practical teaching techniques, including how to design practice so that it does `make perfect'' and how to avoid the `black holes'' in any sequence of learning.

Madeline Hunter was a renowned authority on effective teaching. With more than 25 years'' experience in leading a team-taught, nongraded school, the UCLA Laboratory School, she provided educators with practical ways to change a graded, K-6 elementary school into a nongraded one with multi-age classes at four levels: early childhood, lower elementary, middle elementary, and upper elementary. This book describes the critical attributes of a nongraded school: students'' continuous progress toward clearly stated goals, team teaching, and multi-age grouping. In a nongraded school, teachers diagnose the intellectual, social, physical, and emotional needs of students; assess their levels of skills and knowledge; and determine which teaching style and peer grouping is most appropriate for each student. The instructional program of a nongraded school includes interdisciplinary education, team teaching, long-term developmental objectives for each student, independent study or creative projects, performance-based assessment, and cooperative learning. Essential to the change process is continuing staff development, planning time for teachers, and preparation and involvement of parents. The author discusses creative ways to find time, intrigue the parents, and challenge the teachers. One chapter describes the goal of a nongraded school (or any excellent school): teaching to achieve independent learners. The last chapter is a case study of the change process at work at the UCLA Laboratory School. Note: This product listing is for the Adobe Acrobat (PDF) version of the book.

This paper reports findings from the National Institute of Education''s Napa County Project, one of four follow through projects funded over a period of four years to develop and implement instructional programs that would improve teaching practices, increase students'' academic engaged rates, and increase gain on reading and mathematics achievement tests. The assumptions of the follow through project were that effective staff development would lead to improved instructional practice and the improved instructional practice would help students be more productively engaged in academic tasks. In the Napa County Project, which involved two schools with the largest percentage of children eligible for Chapter I in their districts, Madeline Hunter''s Instructional Theory into Practice (ITIP) was selected as the training model. After a planning phase, begun in 1981, the project implemented the training program, collected implementation and student data, and revised the training program on the basis of yearly evaluations. Instruments to measure program implementation and rate of students engaged were developed and piloted in kindergarten through fourth grade classrooms. Two additional schools were selected to provide a basis for comparisons. Results of numerous analyses indicated that the primary impact of the program culminated at the end of the second year of implementation. Reasons for the subsequent decline are briefly discussed. (RH)

Although teachers hold many conferences with parents, most receive very little training in crucial communication theory and conferencing skills. This guide identifies the purposes of parent conferences and demonstrates skills including how to hold an effective conference; how to deliver an unwelcome message; and how to handle an uncommunicative parent.