Students and teachers alike face a dilemma: Why think deeply when we can just take a shortcut by googling something? Why read an article when we can learn from a social media headline? If, as educators, we want to encourage our students to value thoughtfulness and to embrace the effort it takes to reach deep understandings, we must model that…

One of the major goals of science education is preparing students to be scientifically literate. Argumentation is a core practice to promote both scientific literacy and science learning. However, incorporating argumentation into science teaching can be challenging for both teachers and students. The author introduces the Science Talk--Writing…

Problem solving is one of the main competences we seek to teach students at school for use in their future lives. However, when dealing with mathematical problems, teachers encounter a wide variety of difficulties. To foster students' problem-solving skills, the authors developed "strategy keys." Strategy keys can serve as material to…

Sourcing involves interrogating historical documents, asking questions about their attributes to determine their relation to the historical event or time period under study. In this article, a university researcher and a sixth-grade teacher describe a set of heuristics that the teacher developed for supporting her students' sourcing of historical…

The importance of mathematical visual images is indicated by the introductory paragraph in the Statistics and Probability content strand of the Australian Curriculum, which draws attention to the importance of learners developing skills to analyse and draw inferences from data and "represent, summarise and interpret data and undertake…

Mathematics curriculum designers and policy decision makers are beginning to recognize the importance of problem solving, even at the earliest stages of mathematics learning. The Common Core includes sense making and perseverance in solving problems in its standards for mathematical practice for students at all grade levels. Incorporating problem…

The field of adult language, literacy and numeracy in Australia is a site of struggle as policy changes, new learner groups and new economic imperatives challenge teachers' expertise and beliefs about good teaching practice. This article examines the ways in which experienced adult language, literacy and numeracy teachers shape and reshape their…

This study examines how three elementary teachers refer to pictorial models (photographs, drawings, and cartoons) during science read-alouds. While one teacher used realistic photographs for the purpose of visually verifying facts about crystals, another employed analytical diagrams as heuristic tools to help students visualize complex target…

The article gives information on English language teaching schemes in Indian classrooms for foreign students. The teacher monitors as facilitator and instructor. The trainees were trained in the four macro skills, LSRW. I taught some topics in three skills, namely, writing, listening and reading (just three, not speaking skills) to Chinese…

The gamic mode is an innovative way of authoring scholarly history that goes beyond the printed text or digital simulations by using digital game technologies to allow the reader to interact with a scholarly argument through meaningful choice and trial and error. The gamic mode makes the way in which the past is constructed as history explicit by…

Because wisdom is such a complex and multidimensional construct, it is difficult to study, much less to define. Based on the author's understanding, her definition of wisdom is as follows: "Wisdom is about human flourishing; it is having sufficient awareness in various situations and contexts to act in ways that enhance our common humanity." This…

Simulation games can play a critical role in enabling students to navigate the problem spaces of the past while simultaneously critiquing the models designers offer to represent those problem spaces. There is much to be gained through their use. This includes rich opportunities for students to engage the past as independent historians; to consider…

Teaching science with computer simulations is a complex undertaking. This case study examines how an experienced science teacher taught chemistry using computer simulations and the impact of his teaching on his students. Classroom observations over 3 semesters, teacher interviews, and student surveys were collected. The data was analyzed for (1)…

Teaching for understanding requires teachers to organize thought-demanding activities which continually challenge students to apply and extend their prior knowledge. Research shows that student teachers often are unable to develop lessons in teaching for understanding. We explored how a domain-specific heuristic can assist student biology teachers…

In the context of the home culture, culturally relevant pedagogy aims to make young people "reflect hard on their choices about work and politics, and encourage them to become sensitive to issues of inequality and suffering, and social justice." That is, this pedagogy works to instill a critical consciousness in the students, one where they can…