Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to deflate some of the pressure-orienting teachers toward following a curricular script. Design/methodology/approach: The authors connect effective classroom teaching and learning practices to a dialogic instructional stance that values local resources and student perspectives and contributions. The authors…

"Teaching Bad Apples" is a game developed in 2014 for current and future teachers. It plays much like "Apples to Apples" or "Cards Against Humanity," with each player in turn reading a situation card, followed by the other players choosing their response cards. Each situation, however dramatic or bizarre, is…

Kay Reyerson and her graduate assistant Kevin Mummey applied for and received an internally funded instructional grant to address design challenges in their course Medieval Cities of Europe. One of the grant's goals was to encourage experimentation that might lead to scalable, sustainable, transformative, technology-enhanced pedagogies that could…

The purpose of this study was threefold: to (a) identify students' experiences of distributive, procedural, and interactional injustice; (b) to examine students' emotional responses to these unjust experiences; and (c) to investigate students' behavioral reactions to perceived injustice. Participants were 138 undergraduate students who provided…

A method for uncovering students' thinking about thinking, specifically their meta-strategic knowledge, is explored within the context of an ongoing, multi-year intervention designed to promote the development of students' thinking dispositions. The development of a concept-map instrument that classroom teachers can use and an analytic framework…

Teachers have begun using student response systems (SRSs) in an effort to enhance the learning process in higher education courses. Research providing detailed information about how interactive technologies affect students as they learn is crucial for professors who seek to improve teaching quality, attendance rates and student learning. This…

Investigates classroom environments and sense making within classrooms, using causal mapping techniques. Develops concept structures for classrooms, based on unbiased interviews. A homogeneous conception of classrooms is flawed, because participating fifth graders used highly individualistic concepts or labels to describe classroom environments.…

Describes how students respond when in transition from traditional to innovative language arts instruction. Offers a three-stage grounded theory of change: Comfortable Dependence, Anxiety, and Comfortable Independence. Suggests findings were consistent with other change research that indicates that change is a process implemented over time, is…

Structure limits available options and imposes set modes of learning, responding, and demonstrating achievement. To promote maximum success, teachers must attend to students' preferences. In a typical high school classroom, some students need considerable structure, some need minimal structure, and the rest may operate either way. Providing too…

The Michigan Department of Education with assistance from the Educational Testing Service has compiled the results of valid educational research studies on specific topics into a report to be used as a guide for developing effective schools. It is intended for use by practitioners to help bridge the gap between educational researchers and…

As part of a larger project, a ninth-grade class participated in a year-long exchange of writing with students in an inner-city London classroom. The larger project involved 10 San Francisco Bay Area sixth- through ninth-grade classes exchanging writing with nine inner-city London classes and a Swedish class. Students and teachers in each of the…

Theoretical traditions concerning school environments and student achievement are described, and their insights are linked with analyses of school and classroom interactions to develop a simple conceptual model of environmental influences on student achievement. The literature regarding environmental influences is then reviewed, and the last…

How do we relate to the past? Does it tell us who we are? Is it a source of examples to follow and mistakes to avoid? Or can we go beyond that to something genuinely historical? Arthur Chapman and Jane Facey argue that as history teachers we have a responsibility to instill in our students a sense of historical consciousness which enables them to…

The purpose of this program evaluation was to provide a comprehensive assessment of the effectiveness of the Schools Without Failure (SWF) program. In a study of the SWF program in several schools in a midwestern, metropolitan school district, three sets of variables were measured: student outcomes, classroom characteristics reflecting SWF program…