The author examines guided play among students in a South African classroom using a play-and-write workshop constructed by her and her students. She determines that the workshop displays the characteristics of playful learning, lies on the playful learning spectrum, and fits the criteria for guided play. She concludes that, given the benefits of…

The performing arts are currently in a critical situation worldwide. Various reports warn that the lack of audience. If we focus on dance, and especially folk dances, the situation is worse. In various countries and continents, folk dances are slowly disappearing. In Spain, we find evidence of the downward trend in terms of the number of attendees…

This study investigates whether elementary science teachers participating in a four-week professional development workshop develop new understandings about classroom discourse and whether they are able to implement strategies toward teaching science as student-to-student discourse. Perspectives and the extent of teacher use of discourse strategies…

Teachers across the nation are taking up the call to prepare students for new standards and assessments that require written explanations on a variety of math tasks. But what does it really mean to "explain your answer," and how do educators begin supporting students to write in a genre that is new to both students and teachers? This…

This study explored the relationship between legibility in handwriting scores and compositional scores of students in grade five in one Northwest Georgia school. The ability to recall and write the letters automatically may impact the composing skills of students engaged in the writing process. Handwriting, often considered a motor skill in young…

In this article, John Larmer paints the picture of the ideal high-school graduate--one who is ready for college, career, and life in general. Among other qualities, this student is a problem solver, manages time effectively, works well with others, is open to feedback, and is innovative and creative. How do K-12 schools go about building this…

This paper marks the second in a series of five reports detailing the work of the Optimizing Assessment for All (OAA) project at Brookings to strengthen education systems capacity to integrate 21st century skills into teaching and learning, using assessment as a lever for changing classroom practices. Twenty-first century skills (21CS) are now…

Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) is a complex brain based disorder. Children are being diagnosed with ASD at an alarming rate. Students with ASD present with behaviors that interfere with their learning and the learning of others. These behaviors can be a challenge for the teachers and other staff who work with students with ASD. For the past 25…

Self-determination theory research in physical education has linked more autonomous forms of motivation to many teacher and student benefits. This area of inquiry has largely neglected the impact of motivation on learning. This study examined the efficacy of an intervention in increasing one preservice teacher's provision of need-supportive…

As part of a three-year curricular and professional development intervention focused on English language learners (ELLs), this study examined the intervention's effect on teachers' science knowledge and instructional practices after one year of implementation. The P-SELL (Promoting Science Among English Language Learners) intervention comprised…

This article focuses on qualitative self-report data from a mixed-methods study which investigated Grade 5 and 6 (n = 274), 11-12-year-old, Irish-medium (IM) immersion students' improvement in linguistic accuracy in response to an explicit-inductive approach to form-focused instruction (FFI). A series of typographically enhanced PowerPoint slides…

The following paper seeks to develop a proposal, observing to what extent educational videos and affective learning can strengthen vocabulary in an EFL setting. This action research study was done with fifth grade students belonging to a public school, who showed a low degree of motivation in the English class, making it difficult to acquire the…

Responding to the declining trend in reading motivation in and beyond the elementary school years, the authors aimed to enhance late-elementary school students' autonomous reading motivation. Toward this end, the authors evaluated the influence of a teacher professional development grounded in self-determination theory on fifth-grade students' (n…

In this article we intend to analyze the effectiveness of an educational program of mathematical creativity, designed for learners aged 10 to 12 years, which has been implemented in an urban school of Iasi, Romania. This analysis has both a psycho-educational dimension and a statistical analysis one. The psycho-educational dimension refers to the…

This study examined how evidence of students' mathematical understanding was influenced by elementary schoolteachers' enactment of instructional practices emphasized during a mathematics professional development program. Videos and field notes were collected during lessons for two teachers from the program and two matched comparison teachers.…