School gardens--and efforts to connect gardening to K-12 learning--are burgeoning. Children's gardens--green spaces that keep in mind the way children play and explore an outdoor space--have been one of the biggest recent trends in gardening. Progressive educators have long promoted gardening as an opportunity to connect knowledge about plants,…

A third grader describes Ms. Gonzalez, his favorite teacher, who left to accept a more lucrative teaching assignment. Ms. Gonzalez' butterflies unit covered everything from songs about social butterflies to paintings of butterfly wings, anatomy studies, and student haiku poems and biographies. Students studied biology by growing popcorn plants…

Inspired by study of British teacher centres, an active learning center was developed based on the belief that emphasis on needs of individual teachers and voluntary teacher involvement in designing programs would lead to progress and classroom changes by providing practical group studies in a nonevaluative supportive atmosphere. (JD)

As jobs change, schools must shift in response to evolving information technologies. The concept of "cognition enhancers" can teach us how to use these emerging technologies. School curricula will need to emphasize higher order thinking skills, learning while doing, collaboration, interconnected research capabilities, and…

A group of teacher educators discovered that creating root metaphors (for example, teaching = bread making) connected them with the enjoyable and comforting aspects of their profession. Reading one another's metaphors initiated connections, images, ideas, and insights that could be shared with their preservice students. (MLH)

By focusing on a polluted river and a visit to a rural Tennessee town, sixth-grade students from suburban Asheville, North Carolina, learned more about this controversy than many of their well-informed parents and teachers. Steps for creating similar interdisciplinary thematic units are described, along with the benefits of team teaching and…

Although the Great Flood of 1993 has dramatically reminded us never to take rivers for granted, it has also underlined the need to learn more about rivers and the environment in general. Rivers Project, an interdisciplinary high school curriculum, allows science, social studies, and English teachers to integrate curriculum in a way that encourages…