High-quality early childhood education provides children with opportunities for engaged learning. Yet there are currently no classroom-level measures that focus specifically on how teachers support engagement in the classroom, a key underlying dimension of playful learning. We introduce the Playful Learning Across the Years (PLAY) observational…

Traces influences on a university lecturer's choice of teaching method, drawing evidence from his private journal and the work journals of his students. Concludes that the theory-based use of experiential learning is hypocritical and may be promoting false theory. Proposes an alternative discovery approach in which students and lecturers are…

Notes the dangers of "generic" early childhood curricula. Draws on a teacher's journal to describe letting preschoolers build their own learning from "natural" learning materials--including plastic and cardboard pipes, palm branches, buckets, chains and pulleys--and how the teacher supported their growth. (HTH)

Young children are active learners who touch, feel, experiment, and create. Learning centers are designed to relate to their world of active learning and to encourage their involvement, thereby enhancing development of choice making, oral language, creativity, social skills, responsibility, and understanding of symbols. This book includes…

Children are capable of good thinking, asking perceptive questions, ferreting out implications, making applications, formulating conclusions, and making valid predictions and evaluations. Evidence indicates that these capabilities can be improved by teaching children about questions and questioning. Before such questioning strategies have much…

Adventure games designed for use on home computers are a potentially powerful instructional resource in English as a second language because they promote problem-solving using the target language and are highly motivating to students. The games, whose objective is usually for the user to defeat an obscure force and recover a precious object, are…

This guide to designing activity-oriented classrooms for grades K-3 is divided into six chapters. Chapter 1 provides an overview of research findings concerning the way children learn and the environments that best facilitate their learning. Chapter 2, which explains ways to set up an activity-oriented classroom, covers the administration's role…

Presents an account of a week of learning and instruction from a high school physics course to provide a context for discussion of the role and demands of teacher inquiry. Argues coordination of student inquiry and traditional content is a matter of discerning and responding to students' particular strengths and needs. (Author/KB)

Describes the use and rationale of "Silent Teaching," a teaching technique in which the teacher remains silent as students generate and evaluate hypotheses while trying to understand an as-yet undiscovered concept. (MDH)

This guide describes development of the problem-based approach of GED as project. It is Volume 1 of a proposed four-volume series. Section 1 describes the concept of GED as project, thinking and problem solving, successful intelligence, and integration of content and skills. Section 2 covers GED as project implementation using learning projects…

Research on how the brain works has resulted in wider-scale adoption of the principles of problem-based learning (PBL) in many areas of education, including technology education. The PBL approach is attractive to curriculum developers because it is based on interdisciplinary learning, results in multiple outcomes, is integrated and…