The term "engagement" is widely used in teacher education and professional development. There is, however, a lack of consensus about the meaning of this term: it is defined in numerous ways with various theoretical underpinnings. This article employs a postqualitative approach to explore conceptualizations of engagement and their…

This book delves into the intriguing question of why certain types of literacy research gain more traction than others in educational settings. It draws upon findings from Research Mobilities in Primary Literacy Education, an innovative and interdisciplinary study conducted in England and supported by the Economic and Social Research Council…

In "Rethinking Chronic Absenteeism," Sarah Winchell Lenhoff and Jeremy Singer reframe chronic absenteeism as a symptom of a complex set of factors affecting the student, family, and community rather than simply an accountability metric for educators, schools, or districts. Lenhoff and Singer identify chronic absenteeism--often defined as…

Magic has been a very popular form of entertainment for thousands of years and the learning and developmental processes that take place during the process of practicing and performing the trick--are a precious phenomenon from an educational point of view. The MiniMagic kindergarten program was launched in September 2021 in a kindergarten in…

Due to the learning paradox, students cannot have real difficulty in understanding a mathematical concept that they have not yet understood. There is a gap between real difficulties, directly experienced by students, and illusionary ones, only observed by researchers. This paper aims to offer a critical reflection on our understanding of the term…

In this article, we demonstrate how playful learning serves to provide optimal learning opportunities through teacher-guided play. First, we describe the theoretical design principles that can be leveraged to support mathematical learning for students that have been underserved. Then, we provide concrete examples of evidence-based games that can…

This article tells the story of a teacher and a teacher educator as they grappled, together and apart, with the same question: What does it mean to work well with families as elementary school teachers? Specifically, it interrogates what it means to partner with families. To do so they investigate how partnering with families has led to…

Florida's Broward County Public Schools and the University of Chicago engaged in a Research-Practice Partnership (RPP) to scale teacher practices that support students' critical thinking. As part of the RPP, Jeanne Century's research team conducted research to determine what barriers might limit the spread of these practices. The findings show…

Teacher preparation institutions have been critiqued for insufficient emphasis on the science of reading. The authors argue that although improving early reading success and teacher preparation are both critical issues, today's "science of reading" discourse does not fully capture the complexity of teaching students to read. First, the…

In the United States, school curricula are often created and taught with distinct boundaries between disciplines. This division between curricular areas may serve as a hindrance to students' long-term learning and their ability to generalize. In contrast, cross-curricular pedagogy provides a way for students to think beyond the classroom walls and…

Our contribution to this issue features a K12 school district + university partnership related to technology integration, and explores the connections between technology, teacher learning, creative risk taking, and failure. Austin Public Schools (APS) and the LT Media Lab (LTML) have been engaged in a research-practice partnership (RPP) for seven…

There is a strong focus to connect theory with practice in initial teacher education (ITE). This discussion paper explores how we shifted teaching modes and assessment tasks in light of the Coronavirus Pandemic (COVID-19) when digital technologies were unexpectedly catapulted to the main delivery mode for the preparation of future teachers. During…

Dr. Elizabeth Farley-Ripple, co-Principal Investigator at the Center for Research Use in Education, has addressed two questions as a means of seeking strategies for promoting engagement between research and practice--"How educators connect with research information?" and "How that information moves within schools?" In…

Background: Spatial thinking skills are strongly correlated with achievement in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) fields and emerging research suggests that interventions aimed at building students' skills will likely yield measurable impacts on learning across K-12 settings. The importance of spatial thinking in science has…

[This paper is part of the Focused Collection on Curriculum Development: Theory into Design.] In the "standard" physics education research curriculum-development model, researchers are cast primarily as producers of curricula and instructors are cast primarily consumers, i.e., adopters and adapters. We illustrate a complementary model in…