The demand to incorporate informatics into primary education is seen as a critical necessity both today, and for the future of modern societies. Numerous countries are currently revising their primary education curricula in order to incorporate informatics concepts and computational thinking skills. Although many successful initiatives have been…

This article draws from a small-scale study of headteachers motivated to positively impact on the quality of pupil experience by involving all staff in a distributed perspective on leadership. Each headteacher perceived leadership as involving learned processes requiring support and experience, expending considerable effort in providing a fertile…

Capital City Public Charter School was founded in 2000 with a vision of an academic program built on progressive principles and research on educational best practices. An Expeditionary Learning school and CES affiliate, Capital City was not standard fare for graduates of the average teacher training program. From the beginning, it was clear that a…

Interviews Gordon Wells of the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, Toronto, Canada. Wells extends the concept of children negotiating with people in their environment to create meaning to teachers taking control of their own learning and in so doing facilitating children's taking control of their own learning. (HTH)

Assesses informal learning in experiential settings. Elementary teachers (n=20) from public and private schools participated in an on-site seminar involving experiential learning in science centers, a wildlife refuge, and a zoological sanctuary. The significance of instruction provided by guides, types of exhibits, and the use of informational…

This professional development collaborative involved state agencies, local industry, an outdoor learning center, a university, and teams of teachers from rural schools. The program had three main goals: to introduce inquiry-based approaches to science teaching in the elementary classroom, to utilize field experiences to connect the program to…

This paper reports on an on-going action research study of the elementary school science education courses at the University of Victoria. The Department of Social and Natural Sciences requires that professors evaluate their teaching effectiveness annually using a variety of methods including student evaluations, peer observations, course outline…