The abilities to listen reflectively and speak respectfully concerning another person's opinion, as well as to think critically about that opinion and one's own, are essential to a functioning democracy. The teaching and learning of these abilities is well incorporated into the social studies and English language arts standards that are used to…

"In many ways, images are the vehicle of comprehension, thought, and action. We integrate parts of images, we remember images, we manipulate images." This quote from James E. Zull clarifies the rationale for a discussion protocol called Visual Thinking Strategies (VTS), in which teachers focus students' attention on an image and ask…

The purpose of this article is to introduce a collaborative online international exchange unit for physical education called CULTURE (Cultural Unit of Learning To Understand, Respect, and Empathize). The cultural unit occurred in the Fall of 2019 between an elementary school in New Jersey, U.S., and two elementary schools near Tokyo, Japan.

Classroom-based physical activity (CBPA) is an emerging strategy for increasing youth physical activity, as well as improving academic achievement and on-task behavior. This paper describes the rationale, development, implementation, and evaluation of a professional development training designed for classroom and physical education teachers to…

This paper describes an emerging approach to the design of task sequences to promote reflective abstraction. The approach aims at promoting particular mathematical understandings. Central to this approach is the identification of available student activities from which students can abstract the intended ideas. The approach differs from a…

This article presents the inquiry and literacy processes of two fifth-grade students as they created a digital video about African American history for a school project. During this process, the students gained experience in researching (both on the Web and in books) and writing, with the overall goal of creating a digital documentary video about…

Bransford, Brown, and Cocking (2000) note that students spend only 14% of their time in school but roughly 53% of their time in the home and community. The context of children's home and community life is largely untapped by schools, partially due to the logistics of organizing and capturing these experiences for study in the classroom. The use of…

Fox Hill Primary School is part of a family of schools in Sheffield that is piloting the Specialist Schools and Academies Trust Primary Specialism for Science. In parallel to this work, Fox Hill participated in the Smarter Schools project from September 2008-2009. This project, funded by the AstraZeneca Science Teaching Trust, was set up by the…