In the face of challenging circumstances, many teachers turn to spirituality for sustenance and strength. Yet spirituality's place in education and in educators' lives has long been a matter of confusion and contention, not least because of the ambiguity of the term in its common usage. What is its relationship to religion? And what defines it? In…

Many students throughout the country disengage from the traditional high school model, and all students who graduate from high school do not necessarily acquire the skills required for postsecondary success in college or careers. This action research study sought to examine and develop a competency-based model of curriculum and assessment that…

The integration of social and emotional learning into school curricula has been linked to a number of positive student outcomes, including increased academic achievement, the development of healthy relationships, and improved emotional self-regulation. Rarely, however, has research considered students' perspectives on which social and emotional…

This study uses a framework of transformative learning theory to explore fourteen participants' experiences with learning William Glasser's Choice Theory. The researcher conducted semi-structured interviews with students, staff and alumni of an alternative secondary school in order to explore their perspectives on the transformative potential of a…

Action towards planetary well-being requires more than environmental awareness, acquisition of knowledge, or technological fixes; it necessitates a sacred connection, recognizing interdependence, and an ethic that maintains dignity for all non-human beings. It requires a shift in our ecological consciousness from the dominator and exploitative…

This study considers how English educators can catalyze learning within secondary English education programs to help preservice teachers define and re-examine what counts as writing in the 21st century, and to apply this knowledge in their future school contexts. In it, I explore how preservice teachers develop, articulate, and enact conceptual…

With performativity and evidence-based teaching, the development of action research (AR) by teachers brings tensions and challenges as teachers move outside their comfort zones and question their practice. This article draws on a small-scale research study developed with teachers. It was funded as part of a professional development initiative by a…

Awareness of one's own strengths and weaknesses during visualisation is often initiated by the imagination -- the faculty for intuitively visualising and modelling an object. Towards exploring the role of metacognitive awareness and imagination in facilitating visualisation in solving a mathematics task, four secondary schools in the North West…

Teacher education programs that appear to be more successful work to thread practicum experiences and on-campus courses with an eye to achieving overall program coherence. As part of a funded research project centred on understanding how teacher candidates perceive quality in their practicum experiences and, by extension, in their professional…

This paper examines, ''transformative pedagogy'' in post-primary, language teacher education in Ireland from philosophical, psychological and social perspectives. Links are made, where appropriate, to findings from a study at the National University of Ireland, Galway, Ireland. The construct supports teacher and pupils in developing their identity…

In a values-based education model, ethical vocabulary is introduced to young children with the expectation that embracing these values will elicit positive dispositions and self-regulation. Such an approach has been reported to improve student and teacher wellbeing, academic diligence, the teaching and learning environment, student-teacher…

This qualitative study examined the influences of teachers' experiences on their perceptions of teaching English language learners (ELLs) framed within Mezirow's transformative learning theory. Eight teachers ranging from pre-Kindergarten to 12th grade participated in long interviews responding to a 10 item questionnaire. Each teacher…

This study forms a holistic, rich description of the way a professional development experience transformed teachers of mathematics. This professional development targeted teachers from six underachieving schools in a southern state who trained for a week in inquiry techniques of instruction. The method used to study the impact this experience had…

The 10th International Conference on Educational Data Mining (EDM 2017) is held under the auspices of the International Educational Data Mining Society at the Optics Velley Kingdom Plaza Hotel, Wuhan, Hubei Province, in China. This years conference features two invited talks by: Dr. Jie Tang, Associate Professor with the Department of Computer…