Team-taught courses have the potential to enrich experiences for both students and instructors. While the exact motivations for team teaching vary, these courses often share important goals for the students who enroll in them. For example, many team-taught courses seek to promote students' development of higher-order thinking skills by enabling…

Students often report that social studies is their most boring and least favorite subject. As a child, Woodrow Wilson was bored by history, later describing his early studies as "one damn fact after another." Of course, Wilson went on to become an eminent historian, but only after he learned to reach beyond the "closed catechism" of "questions…

In this webinar, Dr. Sarah Catherine K. Moore, Program Director at the Center for Applied Linguistics, outlined factors for content area teachers to consider as they design and deliver lessons for mainstream classrooms that include English learner (EL) students. This Q&A addressed the questions participants had for Dr. Moore following the…

The authors present adaptability as an important component of reading teacher effectiveness. They demonstrate recent conceptions of teacher effectiveness that value the complexity and unpredictability of classroom instruction. Using an example from a middle grades classroom, they illustrate how effective teachers adapt their instruction to enhance…

This paper focuses on eight teachers nominated as effective in teaching reading to 11-13-year-old students. Data consisted of interviews and unstructured and structured observations of the guided reading lessons. The qualitative data and their analysis explored the research participants' views to give more detail and filter the quantitative…

In terms of teacher quality, Steele believes the best teachers have reached a stage she terms inspired, and that teachers move progressively through the stages of unaware, aware, and capable until the most reflective teachers finally reach the inspired level. Inspired teachers have a wide repertoire of teaching and class management techniques and…

The greatest challenge facing America's schools today isn't the budget crisis, or standardized testing, or "teacher quality." It's the enormous variation in the academic level of students coming into any given classroom. Unfortunately, the issue has become enmeshed in polarizing arguments about race, class, excellence, and equity. What's…

Adapting support contingently to student needs by first diagnosing their current understanding, that is, scaffolding, is considered a key aspect of excellent teaching. The use of classroom scaffolding is rare, however. We therefore investigated the benefits to teachers of a professional development program that was based upon a model of contingent…

The purpose of the study reported here was to explore and describe how Extension agents selected teaching strategies for adult audiences. Andragogy is hypotheses concerning the attributes of adult learners (Knowles, Swanson, & Holton III, 2005). Extension agents responsible for teaching the Master Beef Producer (MBP) program were purposively…

Tutors often make use of explanations that do not promote learning. One reason for the ineffectiveness of explanations might lie in tutors' failure to take into account a tutee's understanding in order to individualize instruction. To test whether tutors provide more effective explanations when they are assisted in assessing a tutee's…

In 2010, the U.S. Department of Education (the Department) contracted with Synergy Enterprises, Inc. and edCount, LLC, to complete a study titled Language Instruction Educational Programs (LIEPs): Lessons From the Research and Profiles of Promising Programs. This study includes a review of the foundational literature related to LIEPs, case studies…

The vision for transforming the education of the nation's nearly four million teacher workforce presented in this report comes not from any one group but from a diverse group representing a broad range of perspectives. The National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education (NCATE) Blue Ribbon Panel on Clinical Preparation and Partnerships for…

During the last few decades, the author and his colleagues have developed an instructional framework for infusing thinking into content instruction in every subject and at every grade level. In thinking-based learning, teachers explicitly teach students thinking strategies and important habits of mind and then give students opportunities to apply…

The finding that effective practice did relate significantly to a trainee's achieving results with pupils is in harmony with the literature of practice effects. (Author)

Focuses on the use of classroom discussions as a teaching strategy and addresses the barriers to good classroom discussions. Explores the work of two teachers who successfully integrated discussion into their classrooms using two different techniques: (1) a seminar; and (2) a deliberation. Discusses the differences between seminars and…