By observing, or "noticing," what sparks learning in the classroom, teachers and students alike can cultivate a learning environment centered around personalization and choice. Education experts John Almarode and Paul Emerich France outline strategies for engineering a culture of self-reflection that sets learning in motion.

While districts and policymakers focus on sweeping changes to schools, teachers can get big results by making comparatively small changes to their daily practice. This companion piece to the McREL book "Tilting Your Teaching" introduces you to the seven Simple Shifts--adjustments that every teacher can make immediately to turn dodgy…

The social unrest during the summer of 2020 in the United States has produced a renewed sense of urgency and agency for the interrogation of curriculum in K-12 education and the development of culturally sustaining practices. This urgency has encouraged more teacher preparation programs to be intentional in developing culturally sustaining…

In this article, I offer a story, rendered in creative nonfiction, of my experience as a young and flustered college professor challenged by a defiant and disruptive graduate student. The story is followed by a critical reflection of the experience where I examine the role of communication and culture in regard to classroom disruptions and assess…

Language ideologies--the way our ideas about language and accent both reflect and are informed by our ideas about people and society--influence us in subtle, often subconscious ways. They can shape classroom practices and potentially create barriers to student learning. In this article, learn about two especially harmful language ideologies that…

Short-term or "one shot" professional development experiences are sometimes deemed less effective because they lack mechanisms for deep and ongoing engagement. Using the music conference as an example, I outline a simple framework on how music teachers might nevertheless use short-term professional development experiences as an impetus…

As students feel empowered to select their own goals, they forge their own journeys to success. A culturally sustaining tool, student reflection is an informative practice for self-paced growth in language learning and beyond. A French and a Spanish teacher share their protocols to bring goal-setting into any classroom, along with the research and…

Teacher reflection has been at the core of teacher development efforts for almost 100 years, yet inconsistency in the literature results from a lack of clarity on how reflection is conceptualized--from its purpose to processes, and how they relate to refining teacher practice. This article draws from research in cognitive science to explain how…

A "polyphonic attitude" is the ability to hear varying voices and to integrate them simultaneously. In this article, I show how both written texts and living classrooms are pluralistic, and I use the auditory metaphor of polyphony to explore the nature of this plurality. Based on this analysis, I suggest that strengthening the teacher's…

Seeing a need to develop the attitudes, knowledge, skills, and dispositions necessary to think deeply about and work effectively with diverse student populations. These authors developed a coaching framework with an explicit focus on equity to provide a high-powered lens to zoom in on a practice and deconstruct it for the purpose of disrupting and…

The action research method of appreciative inquiry (AI) was employed to develop a teaching tool. This exercise involves students' reflections on a course, noting when they learned the most. The AI process of appreciating, envisioning, dialoging, and innovating is used to help students reflect on how they learn. Instructors of all types of courses…

This paper focuses on the exploration of the development of reflective ability as a core competence of prospective teachers. How can reflection and discourse competence be developed by teacher students during their teacher education studies? Currently a method that is experimentally applied in the field of teacher education at the University of…

In this essay I share the ways I have used performed ethnography to explore the notion of border crossing in an undergraduate course called "Equity and Activism in Education." Performed ethnography involves turning the findings of ethnographic research into a play script. My students read two performed ethnographies, "Harriet's…

This chapter begins by outlining Dewey's model for reflective thinking. It then applies this method to examine, using data from a previous study, the power differential between teachers and students, and the fact that students often do not feel welcome or any sense of ownership in the classroom. Hypotheses are developed to help think about…

Faculty eager to transform their teaching often have a difficult time understanding the learning literature and then integrating it into their teaching, in part because neuroeducation concepts such as constructivism, transfer, misconceptions, and metacognition are not part of their existing knowledge. Examples of these concepts in the literature…