"Let Nature Be Your Teacher: Integrating Nature-Based Learning in the Elementary Classroom" advocates for a transformative shift in elementary education through incorporating nature-based learning into the curriculum. In an era dominated by indoor education and heightened screen time, Louise Ammentorp and Helen M. Corveleyn respond to…

Many of today's adolescents have little to no connection to their environments or the native plants and animals that share their spaces. This is primarily due to a significant decrease in the amount of time children spend outdoors now, compared with children in the mid to late 20th century, compounded by a lack of natural history and outdoor…

Many teachers do not notice, or do not understand, the chemistry going on in and around their homes and hence do not point it out to their students. Thus they miss out on an important motivating experience. This article gives a few random examples, most of them well within the understanding of students at key stages 3 and 4 (age 11-16). From…

Virtual, mixed, and augmented reality, termed "extended reality," or XR, have great potential for classroom-based learning. Yet many questions about the use and widespread adoption of these emerging technologies remain. To share insights, opportunities, and challenges, the Joan Ganz Cooney Center at Sesame Workshop and the XR Association…

In 2015, the mass murder of nine people in a South Carolina church by a White supremacist led to greater public questioning of symbols of the Confederacy. This questioning led to action in the spring of 2017 when four large Confederate monuments were removed in New Orleans, Louisiana, and the citizens of Charlottesville, Virginia, voted to remove…

Most function-based intervention plans (FBIP) discuss what to teach, but often fail to address effective methods for teaching the skills addressed in the plan. This article discusses the various parts of the FBIP plan that may require teaching and provides potential instructional approaches for teaching the components of the FBIP to students and…

Discover what happens when your students step out of their daily routines and activate their engagement. Author Katherine Mills Hernandez argues that movement, talk, and the physical environment of the classroom all contribute and influence students' learning. The ideas in "Activate" will help you create a classroom optimized for deeper…

The success of Pokémon Go is demonstrating that augmented reality (AR) is reaching the masses quickly and can be a robust tool to enhance student engagement and learning. Leveraging AR for instructional purposes has the potential to become a powerful medium for Universal Design for Learning (UDL) by providing new tools for multiple means of…

Artworks are not produced in a vacuum, but by the interaction of experiences, and interrelationships of ideas, perceptions and feelings acknowledged and expressed in some form. Students, like mature artists, may be inspired and motivated by their memories and observations of their surroundings. Like adult artists, students may find that their own…

Tea leaves gather in the center of the cup when the tea is stirred. In 1926 Einstein explained the phenomenon in terms of a secondary, rim-to-center circulation caused by the fluid rubbing against the bottom of the cup. This explanation can be connected to air movement in atmospheric pressure systems to explore, for example, why low-pressure…

Good teachers know that the physical environment of the classroom can either enhance or hinder learning. Appropriate room preparation and arrangement of materials reserves class time for learning, while inadequate planning interferes with instruction by causing interruptions and delays. Before the year begins, effective classroom managers…

Sustainable design is a philosophy adopted by people concerned with the health of society and the natural environment. The practice of sustainable design works toward the improvement of the quality of the built environment, while reducing or eradicating the negative impact on the natural environment (McLennan 2004). It is a philosophical approach…

For a science teacher in a city, it can sometimes be a challenge to find curricula that are geared specifically toward urban students. The author tackled this dilemma by creating a unit that focused on the urban surroundings experienced by his second-grade students in New York City. The inquiry-based unit centered on unifying concepts such as the…

This case explores various entrepreneurial initiatives introduced by Dr. Ron Dow, dean of libraries, at a private, research-extensive institution in the northeastern United States. The case serves as an example of how entrepreneurial ideas can be applied within educational contexts, specifically, the academic support context of the university…

The designers of our future built environment must possess intellectual tools which will allow them to be disciplined, flexible and analytical thinkers, able to address and resolve new and complex problems. In response, an experimental and collaborative design studio was designed to inspire and build on students' knowledge and their creative…