While a discussion-based instructional approach is often employed by classroom teachers and university professors for teaching English, literature and varied content areas, there are few studies that have focused on how intellectually sophisticated doctoral students participate in class discussions to acquire discipline-specific content and what…

This research project began as an effort to redesign a learning theory course as transitional space and evolved into an analysis of how unresolved conflict from younger learning selves influence graduate preservice teachers' acquisition of teacher identity. The study draws upon work by Elizabeth Ellsworth on transitional space and Deborah P.…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to explore informal contexts of teachers' workplace professional learning and inform educational researchers, teacher educators, administrators and teachers about ways in which teachers learn to improve their practice. By questioning how teachers learn on-the-job to be better teachers and how school cultures…

This paper describes research on dialogue between teachers and pupils during primary school science lessons, using talk from two classrooms to provide our examples. We consider whether teachers use dialogue to make education a cumulative, continuing process for guiding the development of children's understanding. Case studies of two teachers,…

This article reports on models of teaching that developed as outgrowths of a study of middle-grades mathematics classes. Three specific cases are highlighted that represent deductive (associated with univocal), inductive (associated with dialogic), and mixed (a hybrid of deductive and inductive) models of teaching. Teaching practices associated…

The study described in this article is based on a long-term comprehensive series of investigations that were conducted in the context of teaching high school chemistry in the laboratory using inquiry-type experiments. The students that study chemistry according to this program are involved in an inquiry process that included all the inquiry skills…

In this study, defensive pessimism is reviewed in relation to anxiety, self-esteem, expectations, self-regulation, and self-handicapping. Then, two case studies of American pre-service teachers in a mathematics classroom are provided that move the research beyond survey and correlational studies. In the case analyses, defensive pessimists'…

Teachers using interactive whiteboards (IWB) effectively can engage and motivate students with a range of digital resources to explore science's role in making sense of our world and to construct knowledge of key scientific concepts. The case study research described in this paper illustrates how interactive pedagogies in the IWB classroom were…

The purpose of this qualitative case study was to examine the uses of informational texts within an ethnically diverse, second grade classroom and how the teacher carefully scaffolded students' developing understandings about these texts. A community of practice theoretical framework was employed to better understand the ways in which…

This paper explores one-to-one teaching in an academy of music as culturally constituted. Taking Foucault's concept of discursive practice as a point of departure, the practice of two instrumental teachers is analysed and compared with regards to how the teachers adopt professional discourses to construct their teaching in quite distinct ways, and…

Using a case study approach, this article examines the challenges faced by a cooperating teacher and student teacher during their collaborative planning conversations. I draw on several analytical frameworks, including sociolinguistics, speech act theory and discourse analysis, to analyze the cooperating and student teacher's efforts and struggles…

Purpose: This article explores distributed leadership as it relates to two teacher teams in one public secondary school. Both situational and social aspects of distributed leadership are foci of investigation. Methods: The qualitative study used constant comparative analysis and discourse analysis to explore leadership as a distributed phenomenon.…

In the last decade, the debate over state-mandated standardized testing has become one of the most heated, political debates in education. Situated within that debate and drawing from it, this paper examines the relationship among teachers, teaching, and standardized testing, using the Michigan Educational Assessment Program (MEAP) as a case study…

Focusing on purpose in the writing of college freshmen, a study examined the writing processes and how they related to the conceptions of purpose of four freshmen enrolled in a composition course at Indiana University. Discourse-based interviews were conducted before and after the students completed three tasks designed to vary their choice of…

The book describes one teacher's study of student journal writing in college-level English-as-a-Second-Language (ESL) instruction and explores the potential of student journals in second language teaching. It first introduces the research questions and methods guiding the study, then reviews the literature that informed the investigation of mental…