Teaching topics that implicate student identities, traumas, and/or activism is challenging because students often come with very personal attachments to curricular and extracurricular topics, such as in courses on sexualities, race, gender, and/or social movements. These classes may be described as "wobbly," responding to outside events…

Background: Models-based approaches to physical education have in recent years developed as a way for teachers and students to concentrate on a manageable number of learning objectives, and align pedagogical approaches with learning subject matter and context. This paper draws on Hannah Arendt's account of "vita activa" to map existing…

IDEA's Teaching Essentials (TE) is a useful tool for gathering student feedback on how frequently an instructor exhibits each of seven behaviors that correlate most highly with student perceptions of course and teaching excellence. TE is appropriate for instructors who desire quick, sound student feedback on (a) displaying personal interest in…

Teaching is a spiral rising process. A complete teaching should be composed of five parts: theoretical basis, goal orientation, operating procedures, implementation conditions and assessment. On the basis of the genre knowledge, content-based approach and process approach, this text constructs the Teaching Model of College Writing Instruction, in…

This mini-article describes a faculty meeting process used for curriculum planning. The proffered outline helped us document and assess our program, to focus our conversation, to envision where we wanted students to be, and to share across the curriculum what was happening in our solitary courses. The results prompted us to share with each other…

The degree to which students think, feel, and act engaged in school plays a vital role in their chances for academic and life success, yet levels of student engagement remain low. In this article, we focus specifically on how engagement works in the classroom, namely as a function of the interactions between students, teachers, and the class…

This essay describes a blended (hybrid) course collaboration used to facilitate policy dialogues between graduate students at two institutions (one in Canada and the other in the US) as a way to teach about policy. The course content and design is informed by three trends in research and practice: increased policy borrowing across boundaries and…

If the goal of teaching ethics is to affect behavior and ultimately produce thoughtful, ethical people, then the best process to do this is by embedding ethical practices in student discussions. One teacher demonstrates how she has done this in her classrooms.

Citizens participating in contemporary socio-scientific issues (SSI) need to draw on local knowledge and personal experience. If curricular developments in the teaching of controversial SSI are to reflect contemporary notions of citizenship then the personal narrative is an indispensable instrument in bridging the gap between the local/personal…

Kristin L. Main teaches the Ontario Literacy Course, an alternative course designed to support students who have failed the required standardized test for high school graduation. She sees the purpose of the class as giving students a chance to feel successful and helping them to see the practical value of purposeful communication and integrated…

In this article, the author describes how she changed her process for the oral presentation, which involved looking at its placement in the course, the pace, and the preparation. By moving the team oral presentation earlier in the course, the author hoped to solve two problems. One problem was the increased stress both students and the author…

The role of educational psychology classes is often implied because of its inclusion in most teacher education programs; however, the struggle over how to structure courses has often resulted in learning experiences that do not best meet the needs of all students. The major controversy centers on both the course content and methodology used by…