In 2014, the National Association for Music Education released music standards that strongly emphasized creativity, encouraging teachers to find new ways to implement creative activities into their classrooms. As such, making cross-modal associations and emphasizing divergent thinking are important priorities for teachers to consider. Synesthesia…

Engineering design has been central to technology education. Currently, online collaborative platforms for designers are widely used as digital forms of an engineer's notebook. However, traditional forms are still valued as the medium of engineering design during the conceptual phase of design since a paper notebook and pen or pencil allow…

Geometry students often wonder about the importance of construction techniques. Are they the only way to create geometric figures? What purpose do they serve? How do these techniques relate to other parts of geometry? This article introduces a project used at the high school level that gets all students in a class engaged with construction, gets…

The mathematics classroom is particularly vulnerable to these judgments of perfectionism, with endless evidence of students and teachers believing that mathematics is based on an ultimate truth or a single, objective, unique answer. School mathematics still favors students' participation in rote procedures, memorization, and using only a few…

Art's capacity to foster metacognition puts art education in sync with general education where understanding and monitoring one's thinking are acknowledged to be essential to an individual's success in school and life (Kolencik & Hillwig, 2011; McGuire & McGuire, 2015; Silver, 2013). The mindfulness inherent in metacognition also connects…

Developing students' strengths while teaching the content required by national and state standards in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) is challenging for classroom teachers. In the Cultivating Diverse Talent in STEM (CDTIS) project, the assessment results found in strength-based reports gave teachers the tools needed to…

Many dancers enter college with plans to join a professional company after graduation. However, if for dancers that have already sketched out their post-college professional career on paper and it looks pretty similar to their high school or studio dance experience, then college is going to be a long four years. Choreographers today are searching…

Sixty-six school districts and more than 150 schools in the state of Kansas are participating in the Kansans Can Redesign Project. In this article, we present a case study of using Design Thinking as a systemic process to structure continuous school improvement. The collage of real-life scenarios presented in our case shows the integration of…

In 2011, Dan Rothstein and Luz Santana of the Right Question Institute first wrote about the Question Formulation Technique (QFT), a simple yet rigorous stepwise process to teach all students how to ask better questions, in their book "Make Just One Change: Teach Students to Ask Their Own Questions". Through the QFT, students learn how…

The Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) call for students to exhibit an in-depth understanding of scientific inquiry practices, including direct observation, creative design thinking, and argumentation based on evidential learning. To support academic equity for multilingual learners, these new expectations require reconceptualization of…

This article details the experiences of two teachers attempting to move music-enhanced English curriculum--using music to teach--to a music-integration approach to teaching--students creating music and advancing their knowledge in English.

In this paper we introduce a new collaborative technique in teaching and learning the epsilon-delta definition of a continuous function at the point from its domain, which connects mathematical logic, combinatorics and calculus. This collaborative approach provides an opportunity for mathematical high school students to engage in mathematical…

Teaching poetry offers both challenges and promises for student engagement and response. Because of the ways many students interact with poems in school settings--with an emphasis on the technical elements of poems, rather than on the emotional resonances they evoke--for many learners, poetry can often seem elusive and uncommonly difficult. This…

Picture books are often seen as a valuable tool for younger readers. In this article, the author suggests that the multiple literacies required to read a picture book can provide scaffolding and transmission of additional concepts for older readers.

The value of effective lesson planning for optimized learning is a well researched and established concept in education. Although different formats exist for lesson planning, most contain common components, including a structured ending. One common term for a planned ending to a lesson is closure. Unfortunately, not all lessons are well planned…