The authors of this article have participated in intensive professional development in the Peruvian Amazon and brought this firsthand experience of the rainforest back to their classrooms. However, the activities presented in this article are designed to be accessible and inspirational to "all students," regardless of whether they or…

The lesson described in this article includes a number of overlapping learning goals. The first goal is to develop students' understanding of the complexities associated with the legal regulation of business in the United States. This case study is an excellent means of doing so, since it involves numerous interrelated legal issues. Real-world…

"Local foods" are inherently geographical, rooted in space and place. Students can explore local foods from multiple geography angles. This introduction highlights some of these potential angles as applied to ice cream shops in New York State. Teachers are encouraged to adapt this lesson to fit their own needs and appropriate local food…

This textbook provides K-12 science teachers and educators innovative uses of anchoring phenomenon-based teaching approaches from a justice-oriented lens (Morales-Doyle, 2017). It discusses topics such as the use of anchoring phenomenon-based pedagogies, qualities of productive anchoring phenomena and includes examples of unit plans that use…

Our Introduction to Research Methods course is a first-year majors course built around the idea of helping students learn to work like chemists, write like chemists, and think like chemists. We have developed this course as a hybrid hands-on/ lecture experience built around instrumentation use and report preparation. We take the product from one…

The implementation of the Common Core's Standards for Mathematical Practice can pose a challenge to all teachers of mathematics but especially to preservice teachers. These standards require teaching in a way that often differs from what preservice teachers have experienced as learners. Standard 1--"Make sense of problems and persevere in…

This paper describes the linear algebra class I taught during Spring 2014 semester at Adelphi University. I discuss the details of how I flipped the class and incorporated elements of inquiry-based learning as well as the reasoning behind specific decisions I made. I give feedback from the students on the success of the course and provide my own…

The dramatic increase in hate-related bullying and culturally and/or racially offensive comments or symbols in the wake of the 2016 election came as a surprise for many educators across the United States. Research points to both an increase in frequency of hate related speech and controversy in schools, and teachers reporting a lack of training,…

Consensus is growing that high-quality early education is a critical support to all subsequent learning. In early childhood education quality is generally considered holistically in terms of the physical environment, programmatic structure (e.g., length of the school day), curriculum and instruction, and the nature of interactions between teachers…

This column presents ideas and techniques to enhance science teaching. In this month's issue an upper elementary Science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) challenge brings an engineer into the classroom while emphasizing cooperation, communication, and creativity. STEM activities come in various shapes and sizes. Some are quite involved…

The Industrial Revolution is the subject of one of the high school inquiries of the New York State Toolkit. Social Education presents the following excerpts from the inquiry as an example of a typical Toolkit lesson. The supporting questions include: (1) Where did people move to and from during the Industrial Revolution?; (2) How did daily life…

As Brian Huot and Ellen E. Schendel assert, when assessment has more than validation in mind, it "can become a means for proactive change" (208). In response to this idea of assessment as an optimistic and opportunistic enterprise, this article describes how the structural design of our "equal opportunity" writing program and…

The American educational landscape is changing rapidly, and so are the students in American mathematics classrooms. In the New York City public schools, one of every four students is an English language learner (ELL) (New York City Department of Education 2014). Mathematics teachers find themselves teaching either in a classroom that contains all…

In a first-year seminar on mass extinctions, a field-based, paleontology-focused exercise promotes active learning about Earth's biodiversity, form and function, and the biomimicry potential of ancient and modern life. Students study Devonian fossils at a local quarry and gain foundational experience in describing anatomy and relating form to…

"Low threshold, high ceiling" tasks are accessible to diverse learners; invite a wide range of approaches; and hold the potential to further challenge, strengthen, and extend everyone's mathematical reasoning. In this article, the authors present a family of Brick Pyramid problems as examples of "low threshold, high ceiling"…