Purpose: The aim of this study was to explore opportunities to develop higher-order thinking for students in social studies, with a focus on teachers' content coverage and support for engaging in social studies analysis. Design/methodology/approach: A video study using naturalistic classroom observations of 80 social studies lessons was conducted…

Research that aimed to examine teachers' experiences whilst implementing a reform approach to mathematics teaching in an Irish primary school forms the basis of this paper. In particular, factors that contributed to changing mathematics practice in this case study school are outlined. The school engaged in professional development (PD) that…

It has been theorized that contextual tasks support student engagement and sense making. Yet, contradictory ideas exist about the role of these tasks in lessons, and further research is needed to explore how classroom interactions can help achieve their intended purposes. Through video observation of lessons in three eighth-grade classrooms using…

Across K-12 education, there has been recent attention to the learning opportunities available to students in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) learning. Early childhood education (ECE) has been excluded from this process. The scholarly literature contains good evidence for including science teaching and learning at the ECE…

What teachers attend to, how they make sense of, and respond to critical incidents in the classroom are important for improving teaching. However, seeing and understanding important features of critical incidents can be difficult. In this paper, I propose a notion of productive noticing, which I used to analyse a case study of what teachers…

Lesson starts are transitional events which may cause management problems for teachers. In this study 131 lesson starts of equally many teachers were observed in primary and secondary schools in Finland. The results indicated that, in general, the problems were minimal. However, for various reasons lesson starts were delayed by an average of about…

Michelle is a first-year English teacher at Vailsburg Middle School, a public school in Newark, New Jersey. Michelle is dedicated, caring, energetic, and insightful. This year, the author had the chance to watch Michelle and her principal, Serena Savarirayan, meet for their weekly debriefing of Michelle's teaching. Serena began by praising…

This "Rating a Teacher Observation Tool" identifies five simple questions and provides an easy-to-use scorecard to help policymakers decide whether an observation framework is likely to produce fair and accurate results. The five questions are: (1) Do the criteria and tools cover the classroom performance areas most connected to student outcomes?…

Observation measures of instructional quality tend to fall into two broad categories--those for use across subject areas and those intended for use in specific subject areas. The move toward content-specific measures is a result of research suggesting that effective teaching looks different across subject areas and that both content knowledge and…

This paper reports on a study of classroom interaction as a multi-party and multi-activity phenomenon. On the basis of video-recorded lessons in secondary education schools in the Netherlands, observational records were made of the behaviour of individual students throughout lessons. The main argument in this paper is that when students engage in…

This paper both reviews results of research related to teacher evaluation and then presents a suggested evaluation format to be used based on these research findings. The research reviewed falls into five general categories: format for evaluation, guidelines for evaluation, criteria for evaluation, problems with evaluation, and definitions of…

The relationship between lesson characteristics and the improvement of the delivery of educational services to Hispanic Americans was examined, using data from four contrasting classrooms (two successful and two unsuccessful) located in a Southern California medium-sized school district. The contrast between classrooms was determined by the…

A group of 34 schools considered innovative in their compensatory reading programs were selected for teacher and pupil observation. The purpose of observation was to describe the classroom activities of the teachers and students in a large variety of types of reading classes so that the relationship between what teachers and students do during…

The purpose of this pilot project was to develop, use, and film teaching tasks to demonstrate their effectiveness in showing variations in teaching styles. Thirty teaching tasks designed to include a variety of curricular dimensions were developed by 6 observers with considerable experience as preschool teachers and observers; each task listed…

Informed by theory and research in inquiry-based classrooms, this paper examines how classroom practices support students' understanding of decimals. Data from a six-month teaching experiment, based on the work of Moss and Case's (1999) use of percentages and metric measure as visible representations for students' emerging understanding of…