Peer learning is a strategy designed to enable learners to become active learners. Previous research reveals that college students need support to learn the tasks of their roles in enhancing peer learning. The model of peer learning presented in this paper incorporates scaffolding strategies to design structured peer learning activities in a…

Interest in active learning continues to grow worldwide. Although the large volume of active learning research has provided a myriad of ways to implement active learning in the classroom, the construct remains underdeveloped and difficult to operationalize because of three main issues in the research literature: (a) the confusion surrounding what…

This article describes how to build a classroom community by building representations and visualizations of data related to students' names. The goal of this task was to allow students to get to know each other's identities better by collecting and analyzing data about their names and exploring the connection between names and identities. The task…

Laboratory work in chemistry has been extensively researched in the last decade but the gap between research and practice is still broad. This "Perspective" shares 10 guiding principles relating to university laboratory education, drawing on research over the last decade. Written with an audience of practitioners in mind, the…

Storytelling passes down traditions and values while preserving languages and serving as a natural site for linguistic innovation and creativity. This article describes an approach to creating multilingual, multimodal stories that were developed for an after-school club at a rural Tanzanian secondary school. Club members told stories, wrote…

This article begins with vignettes that demonstrate how talent potential can (and does) manifest differently in different children. While some children display talent in one or more academic fields, other children demonstrate creative, intellectual, or artistic aptitudes. Regardless of their field or domain of talent, all children can benefit from…

After years of controversy and terminological debate, the plurilingual approach is now well accepted by language teaching communities. Still, doubts concerning how the plurilingual approach can shape the way we teach languages remain. The aim of this article is to describe a pedagogical and sequential approach that can be followed by teachers who…

The flipped class allows the instructor to put materials online that would normally be provided in the traditional lecture format and frees up class time for hands-on learning activities. This paper provides a broad overview of what is required outside of the class via an electronic platform such as Blackboard (Bb) and what is done during class.…

In this article we share several activities we use in our teacher education literacy courses that incorporate a social justice lens. For each activity we suggest resources, offer examples we have created and used in our teaching, and share research to support each activity. The activities build on each other, with the intent of increasing…

Middle school general music programs can be vibrant, exciting places, where students are inspired to learn more about music and themselves. In this article, the author discusses how to work with rather than against adolescents' age-appropriate characteristics when planning "content", "process", "assessment", and "classroom environment". Then, she…

Most educators who work with gifted students acknowledge the importance of creativity and have found various ways to include it as part of the gifted education curriculum. In many cases, however, developing creativity is still viewed as something separate from academic learning. Students with undemonstrated creative potential often are excluded…

This summary accompanies the national report for Northern Ireland (Sizmur et al., 2017). It outlines the attainment of Year 6 pupils in Northern Ireland in the Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS) 2016 survey and explores the context of that attainment. PIRLS is a study of reading at ages 9-10 and has a five-yearly cycle.…

Students who have a strong urban place-identity may perceive the natural world differently from many geoscience instructors. These urban thinkers have less experience in the natural world and are more comfortable in built environments. They may have subtle differences in cognitive and spatial skill development, interest level in the natural…

At a time when the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) and partner countries are trying to figure out how to reduce burgeoning debt and make the most of shrinking public budgets, spending on education is an obvious target for scrutiny. Education officials, teachers, policy makers, parents and students struggle to determine…

Mobile educational systems have begun to emerge as potential educational environments supporting life-long learning. However, these environments still suffer from various technological and access related problems in many parts of the world. For example, the access to course materials is slow; courseware does not adapt to individual students; the…