We discuss how discourse actions can provide students greater access to high quality mathematics. We define discourse actions as what teachers or students say or do to elicit student contributions about a mathematical idea and generate ongoing discussion around student contributions. We provide rubrics and checklists for readers to use.

How better can we prepare students for the roles awaiting them as citizens than by engaging them in addressing challenging issues of the day? We describe our experience as a researcher--practitioner partnership with this objective in a yearlong program involving academically low-performing urban middle schoolers and a student-centered…

Preservice teachers (PSTs) must be able to link content, effective teaching practices, and student learning; thus, it is critical for teacher educators to emphasize connections between research and practice in methods courses. Reflection plays an important role in this process. In this article, the authors discuss and illustrate a vignette…

Purpose: This tutorial describes a comprehensive approach to the development of collaborative academic conversations in older students with language delays and impairments. Support materials including a link to an instructional video are provided. Conclusions: These students require systematic, explicit instruction to develop competence and to…

This article provides information on a team-building activity in which student teams make salsa. I usually use this exercise on the day that I form teams to provide an opportunity for teams to work on something that is not graded prior to completing the graded team assignment. The activity is built on several theories, such as social learning,…

Young Learners have less reinforcement to speak with others. One of the causes is the trend of formal or clumsy learning setting in emphasizing the speaking proficiency. Speaking based on the culture context also contribute them in increasing their motivation to express their ideas. "Casual style" as one of the language variations gives…

The role of the personnel evaluation process in improving the performance of teachers as classroom communicators is explored by contrasting the personnel evaluation system of Alaska Pacific University (APU) with that of the Anchorage School District (Alaska). While the APU system offers little specification for formative evaluation activities, the…

Addressing the problem of the language-related barriers to successful postsecondary education for underprepared college students, an assessment of academic language proficiency and a curriculum to help students improve their academic language skills were developed. The nature of the language tasks required in the undergraduate curriculum was…

The subtle or overt ways in which women and men students are often treated differently are discussed, and actions that can be taken to create a learning climate that fosters the intellectual growth of all students are identified. Information was obtained from several kinds of sources, including empirical studies of postsecondary and other…

A project to identify alternative strategies for assessing the academic language of English language learners is reported. First, literature on the concept of academic language is reviewed, and then findings from classroom research are used to propose an alternative conceptualization of academic language, one which focuses on the role of stylistic…

This paper describes how students can be personally challenged in the work they do and how secondary students or tertiary-level education students and teachers can collaboratively diagnose existing quality of classroom practice, via the concepts of personal challenge and interpersonal shared adventure. The approach involves the teacher obtaining…