This book focuses on faculty members in a learning community in the College of Education at Florida International University. It discusses their pedagogical efforts to structure learning environments consistent with the philosophical orientation in the college's conceptual framework to call forth dispositions, or key habits of mind that are consistent with reflective intelligence.

This book is written with the hope that pre-service teachers and in-service professional educators will participate in learning communities as means toward enhancing their professional growth. As teachers and learners invest themselves in collaborative group approaches, they develop a firmer sense of their own identity. Enhancing Effective Thinking and Problem Solving for Pre-Service Teacher Education Candidates and Inservice Professionals specifically focuses on the use of the case method to engender higher order thinking regarding the knowledge base on which best practices in teaching and learning rest. Teacher education candidates and classroom teachers should find this a helpful and motivational source.

Dispositions as Habits of Mind provides opportunities for candidates in teacher education programs, which focus on nurturing and assessing dispositions, to see the habits of mind for making professional conduct more intelligent, practice them, and receive feedback about their performance. Some scholars have pointed out that the rush by many teacher education programs to meet accreditation mandates with regard to "dispositions" has generated a host of measures for assessing dispositions and very little focus on programs first establishing some conceptual understanding of the construct, and then teaching candidates about dispositions. This work on dispositions highlights the serious effort to help teachers and other professional school personnel to form habits and use them as active means in making their professional conduct more effective and intelligent.

This timely book provides a Deweyan approach to the acquisition of dispositions against the NCATE requirement for the development of a conceptual framework that is lived and continuously evaluated. The work is, therefore, vital to colleges of education that are pursuing educative means toward the end of pedagogical thoughtfulness for teacher education candidates and other school personnel.

Bringing Out the Best in Human Effectiveness will greatly interest anyone aspiring to improve the human condition. This book focuses on an Upward Bound program conducted at the University of West Florida between 1979 and 1983. Federally funded Upward Bound programs offer academic instruction, individual tutoring, and counseling for low-income, disadvantaged high school students. This study examines what the program meant and continues to mean to participants. It is this meaning that provides context for important lessons in transformative teaching and learning. This is the long-untold story of participant observers and the lessons they learned about the kind of teaching and learning that changes lives.