This experiential exercise uses feedback from peers to develop students' classroom contributions and build a classroom climate that encourages active engaging and learning. It is best suited for courses that require active classroom participation, but works well in any format, traditional and online, and with any level of students. The activity…

In these challenging times, it is essential to activate student voice and prepare them for civic engagement and social action. Social-emotional learning strategies integrated into the social studies curriculum help to accomplish just that. Laura Bond, Maurice Elias, and Samuel Nayman describe the STAT program, which enables students to build both…

Having observed and coached in hundreds of K-12 classrooms since 1994, Ron Nash has come to a few conclusions about what makes teachers tick and classrooms click. The best teachers attend to those seemingly little things that cost nothing, even as they create classroom climates where students can't wait to walk through the door every day. The big…

This article shares a paper presented as the keynote for the Terry L. Wood Memorial Conference that was held virtually on May 20, 2022. This paper starts with a reference to the project, The Coordination of a Psychological and Sociological Perspective, that was funded by the Spencer Foundation. The results of the research in this project are…

This commentary to Ha and Kim's article suggests three ways to expand the interpretive functions of framing to explore and support marginalized students' participation in collaboration and learning, based on our comprehensive review of Ha and Kim's and other relevant studies. We argue that framing can be a useful tool for (1) understanding both…

Teachers play a critical role in student learning, however effective teaching and learning cannot take place without established rules, procedures, and routines for the classroom. If your goal as a teacher is to help students understand classroom expectations and how to apply these expectations within different situations then just presenting the…

In this executive summary, the Rennie Center reexamines the current way of doing business, looking at how educators can incorporate student voice into decision-making processes in order to help all learners construct a pathway to success in college, careers, and life. Massachusetts faces challenges in preparing all students for lifelong success,…

In this article, the author shares his fear that students will become accustomed to an educational experience that lacks joy and fun as a result of the changes made to education due to the COVID-19 pandemic. He and his teaching colleagues have noticed that when students are learning virtually, they act much more as receivers of knowledge than…

In this article, research tracing the historical progression of agency within recent educational reforms and empirical research from a variety of classrooms (geographic regions and grade levels) is discussed to document the power of agency across contexts. This article aims to propose a collaborative way of thinking about student agency from…

Teachers often think of student engagement in terms of hands-on activities that get students involved in their courses. They seldom consider the larger aspects of the teaching--learning environment that often influence the extent to which students are willing to become engaged in their coursework. In this chapter, we describe five "rules of…

The author describes a challenge that is familiar to many language teachers: trying to get students to speak up independently, share thoughts, and participate authentically in the target language. The article includes general and specific tips for creating a comfortable, communicative classroom environment.

Asking students questions is a ubiquitous but often underestimated aspect of teaching within higher education. Questions can be used to engage students in discussion, to check their understanding, and to encourage participation or sharing of ideas. However, while it is a useful strategy to prepare a few key questions before class, many questions…

Parents want to work with their children's teachers to help them succeed in school. "What Brain Research Says about Student Learning" provides parents and teachers the most recent findings in brain research and learning theory in a very approachable way. The reader will see how the child's brain develops, learns, remembers, and creates…

One can become a responsive teacher who promotes equity by continuously engaging in the following processes: (1) Attend to students' needs or struggles stemming from both inside and outside the classrooms, in addition to their intellectual contributions as members of a classroom learning community; (2) Interpret classroom situations with a…

To address a deteriorating classroom climate at the midpoint of a two-semester course sequence, we employed a novel intervention: reading a research manuscript together with students as an invitation to legitimate peripheral participation in scholarly reflection on teaching and learning. This intervention resolved many student complaints about the…