This paper is focused on an innovation which involved students being assessed on short written responses to an issue to be addressed in the following classroom session. The innovation was evaluated through a student survey, individual and focus-group interviews with participants, and the analysis of a critical friend. Positive findings included…

This article presents the findings of a linguistic ethnographic pilot study, conducted as part of an ongoing research study, to examine how students utilise their knowledge and experience in understanding literary texts being studied from different cultural and temporal spaces. The analysis of this development in the students' comprehension of new…

Experiential learning alone does not guarantee that students will accurately conceptualize content, or meet course outcomes in subsequent active experimentation stages. In an effort to more effectively meet learning objectives, the experiential learning cycle was modified with a unique combination of the 5 Whys root cause problem-solving tool and…

Although we now have a growing number of general suggestions for improving instruction in principal preparation programs as well as studies on particular instructional models, there is a dearth of studies that compare the broad range of traditional and innovative instructional strategies available to professors of educational leadership. Moreover,…

In this article we propose a five-step sequenced approach to integrative interdisciplinary learning in undergraduate gateway courses. Drawing from the literature of interdisciplinarity, transformative learning theory, and theories of reflective learning, we utilize a sequence of five steps early in our respective undergraduate gateway courses to…

When evaluating the effectiveness of their program, members of the Brooklyn College SEEK Department, a higher education opportunity program, decided to make their pedagogy more student-centered. They created a method of reading instruction, which they named critical inquiry. Its goals are to build community through teaching students to annotate,…

This article presents a written assignment designed to achieve several goals. First, it offers students the chance to identify and examine the "pre-understandings" with which they enter the class, and to consider how these were formed. Once they have been elaborated, these "pre-understandings" inform the instructor and the student about biases and…