In the late 1990s, linguist Deborah Tannen argued that America had become an "argument culture" characterized by an adversarial frame of mind when approaching the world and the people in it. Recent events appear to have added apocalyptic fears (not entirely unfounded) to our adversarial approach. How can we talk to each other in such a…

When Dr. Tina Lupton and Dr. Timisha Barnes-Jones joined the Winston-Salem/Forsyth County Schools, Opportunity Culture implementation was happening in the midst of COVID. Lupton, the executive director of professional learning, and Barnes-Jones, the area superintendent for a network of 15 transformation schools, used their experience in other…

A group of mathematics teacher educators (MTEs) began a lesson study to develop a research-based lesson to engage elementary preservice teachers with professional teacher noticing within the context of multidigit multiplication. Afterward, MTEs continued teaching and revising the lesson, developing an integrated process that combined lesson study…

The isolation related to the COVID-19 pandemic is causing both physical and mental health concerns for children worldwide. When the pandemic is over, schools and kindergartens represent a crucial context that can play an important role in promoting young people's well-being. This paper presents a school re-entry program aimed at creating an arena…

Schools and communities continually strive to develop more effective methods of educating children and youth about mental health and how to access available resources. Despite this apparent need, several barriers prevent youth from engaging in discussion and taking action. Young people are of special concern since three fourths of all mental…

We describe a pair of fully integrated courses designed to teach biology to non-majors in a manner that connects authentically to the liberal arts. The co-taught courses were organized around the question: What does it mean to be human? Students investigated this question in the context of three topics: dis/ability, race, and sex and gender. In…

Support of students' social and emotional learning plays an important role in a Multi-tiered System of Support (MTSS). The study by Schumacher (2014) summarized in this research to practice brief, "Talking Circles for Adolescent Girls in an Urban High School: A Restorative Practices Program for Building Friendships and Developing Emotional…

While high IQ is likely to be an advantage in moral reasoning, it does not guarantee students' putting those morals into practice. A clearly defined sense of purpose grounded in values of social responsibility, exploration of values, and the search for ultimate truths, both personal and collective, is paramount. The Meaning in Life program in…

This chapter reflects on the educational, socioemotional, and relational impact of a critical literacy and trauma-informed reading discussion group for women of color, highlighting the collective sense of knowledge, awareness, and resistance nurtured through the group process.

After traumatic events, such as a natural disaster, children who are directly or indirectly affected by the event often have a number of intense emotional reactions. It is important for educators to understand common emotional and psychological responses to disastrous events and to try to help. This article describes a physical activity program…

Critical thinking is thought-focused on how to solve a well-defined problem when several alternatives solutions to the problem exist. Because critical thinking may help to build tolerance toward others, the author believes it is a worthwhile subject to investigate, given that people are living in an increasingly multicultural society full of…

This article outlines an approach to class advising which draws on research-based techniques to elicit feedback and discussion from students. The purpose of using this method is to enhance communication, increase student engagement, and improve the relationship between the faculty and the class of students.

In this article, we provide a discussion on our revision method (termed "prescriptive tutoring") aimed at revealing students' misconceptions and misunderstandings by getting them to solve physics problems with an anonymous partner via the computer. It is currently being implemented and evaluated in a public secondary school in Singapore,…

In this article, the author describes a project designed to take the dread out of discussion in a first-year interdisciplinary humanities course at Sewanee: The University of the South, a private liberal arts college in Tennessee. The Responsible Intellectual Discussion project, known as RID, was created in conjunction with the college's Eloquence…

The contributors to this article reflect on the process and value of participating together in a monthly reflective supervision group for supervisors in a child abuse prevention program. Some of them joined the group with considerable interest in and experience with reflective supervision. For others this was an entirely new experience that they…