As Texas schools become increasingly diverse, educators are presented with opportunities to build on students' linguistic strengths and engage in transformative literacy teaching. Culturally sustaining early literacy instruction provides an avenue for teachers to support multilingual learners by leveraging their linguistic and cultural experiences…

Protocol-guided teaching, a method of classroom instruction reform started by Donglu Middle School in Nanjing of China has developed into a student-centered teaching model in the context of the deepening reform of Chinese basic education. In this model, the teacher plays an essential guiding role, and the main objective is the development of the…

When Trudy Knowles needed a change in her elementary curriculum class, she decided to teach her students to juggle. Her excuse was that juggling would impress their future students, but she soon realized that learning a skill like juggling can give teachers a better understanding of how students feel when they learn something new. Here, she shares…

Mastering the ability for learning to learn is the most ambitious goal of modern educators. A distinction is made between two relatively independent components of this expertise: (a) the reflective component of the learning to learn ability that allows a person comprehend what knowledge and skills he or she lacks to act in the new situation; (b)…

Students who are slow to respond to traditional instruction and intervention require intensified intervention. Visual Activity Schedules (VAS) are an evidence-based type of visual support that provide sequential organization of the steps for an activity or skill. VAS can be aligned with individual student needs, including behavioral support. VAS…

This paper describes the theoretical foundation for a work in progress project of developing a mobile learning solution for sloyd education named Talking Tools (TT). Being a learner in a multimodal, blended learning environment entails both consuming and creating own content using a number of media sources and tools. For sloyd education, this…

The purpose of this article is to introduce a research design, which aims to find useful pedagogical adaptations for teaching pupils with autism. Autism is a behavioural syndrome characterised by disabilities and dysfunctions in interaction and communication, which is why it is interesting to explore educational processes particularly from an…

Learning progressions (LPs)--descriptive continuums of how students develop and demonstrate more sophisticated understanding over time--have become an increasingly important tool in today's science classrooms. Here the author discusses some of the research behind learning progressions and presents The Science Inquiry Profile for PreK-4. This is a…

Research indicates that gender influences how children learn. Those findings do not necessarily mean that boys learn one way and girls another. Still, there are significant differences with respect to gender and how our brains develop. Researchers have found that no single area of development influences those gender differences: rather, a…

This paper presents a platform on which a new generation of applications targeted to aid the self-organised learner can be presented. The new application is enabled by innovations in trust-based security of data built upon emerging infrastructures to aid federated data access in the UK education sector. Within the proposed architecture, users and…

Students can imitate scientists at work by conducting inquiry investigations in the classroom, thereby exhibiting a multitude of skills and competencies. As stated by Bransford and Donovan (2005), learning science as a process of inquiry involves students in observation, imagination, and reasoning about the phenomena under investigation. Rather…

The article discusses about the importance of ethics, values and character integration in the teaching and learning process particularly on the part of the teacher. In the teaching of Social Studies as a subject, the teacher has also the responsibility of imparting and implying values and ethics particularly in the secondary schools education. In…

The Progress in Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS) was developed to help improve the teaching of reading and the acquisition of reading skills around the world, and was approved by the IEA (International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement) General Assembly as an essential component of the IEA's regular cycle of core studies,…

Claims "why" questions are asked out of curiosity or criticism. Discusses eight methods of answering (appealing to authority, tradition, popularity, practicality, or feelings, admitting ignorance, turning the question back, and addressing reasons). Argues that "why" sits at the very heart of learning. (SR)

Explores two ways of conceptualizing teaching and learning to think using transcripts of classroom talk taken from two empirical studies of elementary school students, one demonstrating distributed cognition and one teaching distributed cognition. Discusses transfer of words and rules; internalization; and implication and subjectivity. (Author/LRW)