State and national standards, including the Common Core State Standards, state that students should be expected to learn to discuss and analyze texts, comprehend ideas in increasingly complex texts, and justify their thinking. Literature circles are an instructional practice suggested by many educational writers as an instructional practice that…

The purpose of this qualitative study was to use an Appreciative Inquiry (AI) approach to discover generative instructional and assessment practices of teachers in the language arts classroom at a 5th and 6th grade low socioeconomic public school campus in Texas that earned five distinctions or three consecutive years. The study sought to design a…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to examine how data are used in classroom placement routines. The authors explore educators' assumptions about the purposes of the classroom placement routine, detailing the ostensive (i.e. structure and template) and performative aspects of the routine itself, and the implications of data use for equity and…

The purpose of this research was to determine the depth and scope of Global Citizenship Education (GCE) through the International Baccalaureate (IB) Primary Years Programme (PYP) exhibition. The small-scale qualitative study describes how a fifth-grade cohort and teachers at The International School of Azerbaijan uncover GCE in situ. Drawing on…

Formative assessment is a classroom learning process that consists of clear goals and objectives, assessing students' knowledge, providing feedback and adjusting instruction based upon the data within a socially interactive process. Because of inconsistent implementation of the formative assessment process within classrooms, the efficacy of the…

Classroom talk patterns are notoriously resistant to change. This article examines changes in one fifth-grade teacher's discourse practices and beliefs as she and the author engaged in inquiry-driven professional development. Discourse analysis of class discussions and qualitative analysis of transcripts of professional development sessions…

The purpose of this qualitative study was to explore two elementary teachers' implementation of engineering design over two academic years and to describe how their teaching practice changed over the two instructional cycles. This study used field notes and audio transcripts of the teachers during their engineering design teaching, written…

While key conceptions and the status of environmental education (EE) have been reported at various international, regional, national and local levels, those in play in the schools of Quito (Ecuador) are still relatively unknown. Of particular interest to this study are private schools: they are considerable in number in Ecuador and elsewhere, yet…

Little research exists describing what teachers do with new experiences and knowledge after participating in environmental learning programs and the students return back to the classroom This qualitative study aimed to fill this gap by examining and describing the follow-through implemented by teachers after their classes participated in the…

This case study described teachers with varying technology skills who were implementing the use of geospatial technology (GST) within project-based instruction (PBI) at varying grade levels and contexts 1 to 2 years following professional development. The sample consisted of 10 fifth- to ninth-grade teachers. Data sources included artifacts,…

This piece describes how a 5th grade language arts teacher employed technology to create and sustain a metaphorical, virtual, and physical figured world in her class by means of a web site called "The Hive Society." This world positioned students as intellectuals and scholars, and explored how Ms. Smith integrated 21st Century…

This research study is dedicated to the importance of the arts, and the importance of being taught the subject of art from a licensed art educator. Bringing in a personal perspective of being an art teacher, the researcher shows his dedication to showing how the arts impacts lives on a daily basis. The overriding question of this study is,…

This qualitative study examined the amount of time that fourth and fifth grade teachers devoted to literacy instruction within the time allotted to them within the daily literacy block. Prior research of the literacy block focused largely on primary grades (Allington, McGill-Franzen et a1.,2010; Cunningham & Allington, 2003; Morrow, 1992);…

During the past century the educational reform movements focused on the need for highly qualified teachers based on research surrounding the effects on student achievement related to the quality of the teacher (Busatto, 2004). The National Board for Professional Teaching Standards (NBPTS) was created in 1987 in response to the increasing focus…

Problem Statement: Within Language Arts instruction the use of teacher-student writing conferences is accepted as an effective strategy for teaching writing. The writing conference allows for an individual one-on-one teacher-student conversation about the students' writing or writing process and provides the student an audience in terms of…