When students walk into a classroom, often the first question is, "What are we going to do today?" It is easy for educators to fall into the trap of using activities exclusively without considering the value or intent of the content. After all, the students are engaged, and if they are busy they must be learning. Simply being busy,…

In recognition of various power systems within and surrounding their classrooms, U.S. women's studies instructors have for several decades worked to reconfigure the college classroom as an environment that enables all students to speak, thus creating empowered communities and ultimately inspiring the next generation of leaders. As some of the most…

If you are seeking greater student engagement and growth, you need to integrate high-impact formative assessment practices into daily instruction. Read the final article in our five-part series to find advice aimed at leaders determined to bring classroom formative assessment practices district wide. Learn: (1) what you MUST consider when…

Youth are an ever-present component of conversations about culture, interconnectedness, and its effects, especially characterized as readily consuming all that globalization has to offer them. However, opportunities to acknowledge and legitimize the civic experiences youth have and the contributions they make to society have been overlooked in our…

This article describes how the qualitative research tradition known as "positionality" can be used as a method to support classroom equity. The text describes three ways teachers can use a spoken approach to positionality in their day-to-day practice. Classroom vignettes illuminate how these spoken methods of positionality can address…

The video modeling (VM) teaching strategy is one in which a student watches a video of someone performing a specific behavior, skill, or task and is then expected to complete the behavior, skill, or task. This column discusses the variety of ways in which VM has been documented within the literature and supports teacher interest in the strategy by…

Little continues to be known about what actually happens in classrooms, particularly from a national perspective. Descriptions of classroom practices from a national vantage point can provide a bird's eye view of salient patterns and variations within an education system, especially one as centralised as that of Malaysia. With these descriptions,…

This article uses an auto-ethnographic approach to explore the reflections and insights that occurred during my teaching of a subject in adolescent development on the Thai Burma border. This paper adopts a relatively descriptive style to a personal reflection of teaching on the border and how it transformed the way I teach and made me look at the…

The "world culture" framework posits a convergence in the organisation of education across the world. On the other hand, scholars observing teaching practices inside classrooms find significant variation among nations and regions of the world. This study examined the global change patterns of classroom practices at the between- and…

This article identifies homework as an underutilized strategy in physical education. It reviews the benefits associated with the use of homework in the physical education setting, and provides guidelines for the effective implementation of this strategy. The guidelines include practical application examples and define structured active homework…

Research indicates that teachers feel intimidated into fully implementing prescribed literacy curriculum at the expense of their own praxis which may indeed be effective in boosting student literacy achievement. This perceived intimidation may serve to compromise students' literacy outcomes. The objective of the study was to recognize the…

Formative assessments are an important part of the teaching and learning cycle. Instructors need to monitor student learning and check for understanding throughout the instructional phase of teaching to confirm that students understand the objective before embarking on the summative assessment. Typically, online classrooms are developed with…

This study examined teachers' implementation of an early literacy intervention, Systematic and Engaging Early Literacy (SEEL), on kindergarten children's development of early literacy skills. One hundred forty-nine kindergarten children (102 treatment) across six classrooms participated in this study. Results reveal that children who received SEEL…

This study examines a teacher's questioning strategies in mathematics classrooms in China when implementing reform-based mathematics curriculum. It explores teacher's strategies to deal with the tensions involved in the creation of opportunities for students to express and communicate mathematics ideas while ensuring the productivity of…

Recognition of the critical role of indigenous knowledge systems (IKS) in science in the new South African national curriculum for schools affirms the importance of IKS, particularly in the natural, physical and life sciences, as they are included in its policy. This paper explores the question of how teachers implement IKS in their science…