Elementary students at the Milton Hershey School in Hershey, Pennsylvania, don't just learn knowledge and skills; they put it to work. The school's Innovation Lab for grades K-4 offers students hands-on opportunities to use design thinking to solve problems. In this article, two of the school's educators describe how 2nd graders used design…

Multilingual students can thrive as multilingual writers when teachers create rich, meaningful contexts. The authors argue that teachers should use Brian Cambourne's seven conditions for learning as a guide: immersion, demonstration, approximation, engagement, expectation, responsibility, employment (use), and response.

The traditional method of teaching math--showing students how to do a procedure, then assigning problems that require them to use that exact procedure--leads to adults who don't know how to approach problems that don't look like those in their math book. Seeley describes an alternative teaching method (upside-down teaching) in which teachers give…

Teachers often tend to discuss their English language learners (ELLs) in terms of "level." Writes the author, "But if I were to say to a teacher, 'You have four level 2s in your class,' how does that help us have a common understanding of the students' needs?" One approach that has great potential to increase students' language…

Describes a plan to split a problematic second-grade gifted class into two parts, fill the remaining seats with mainstream ESL children, and collaborate in teaching the classes. From the start, the children mingled socially and academically; student teachers could not tell which were from the initial gifted group. Heterogeneous grouping also paid…