This article explores the work of "Rethinking Schools" (RS). RS is at one and the same time a grassroots movement of teacher-activists, a quarterly journal, and a publishing house. For almost four decades the movement has sought to enact Freirean-inspired curricular/pedagogical initiatives within US public schooling. What makes the work…

Research on effective teaching and learning confirms that thoughtfully designed unit plans and lesson plans can help all students learn more deeply, especially when teachers shift how they think about and approach their lesson planning, moving away from a teacher-centric perspective and toward a student-centric one. A teacher-centric perspective…

With so many standards to address and templates to fill out, curriculum design and lesson planning can be cumbersome and overwhelming. And every teacher knows the struggle of trying to cover all the required content, which may or may not resonate with their students. In "Streamlining the Curriculum," experts Heidi Hayes Jacobs and…

Reform efforts in different parts of the world call for the adoption of integrated approaches to STEM education. However, little is known about how teachers work, as members of learning communities, to design STEM teaching material such as lesson plans. To address this gap in the literature, we examined the design of STEM lesson plans by…

This paper investigates how Japanese lesson study has been modified in the context of the U.S., and how this modification has affected teacher agency based on the framework of the ecological approach proposed by Priestley et al. (2016). There are two major findings. First, Japanese lesson study has been adapted and modified in the U.S. as an…

This dissertation explores the lived experience of short-term substitute teachers in K-8 public school settings, aiming to deconstruct common assumptions and identify areas for improvement in support systems. A case-selection variant of an explanatory sequential mixed methods design was utilized. In the first phase of the study, quantitative data…

This paper explores the implementation of task-based language teaching (TBLT) at a military institution in the United States after face-to-face instruction transitioned to virtual mode with the onset of the pandemic in March 2020. The institution implemented TBLT before the pandemic. With the transition to the online mode, an online collaboration…

Lesson study has attracted the attention of teachers and teacher educators over the past two decades, and practices vary from region to region and from school to school. This study, as a conceptual discussion paper, aims to discuss the modes of coordination of lesson study at the school level, based on comparative institutional analysis (CIA). CIA…

A new curriculum, namely the Merdeka Curriculum, was implemented to overcome the learning loss due to the pandemic. Teachers are responsible for developing lesson plans to meet the curriculum objectives. Preparing lesson plans is vital for preservice teachers as it helps them with their teaching practice. This study examines pre-teachers'…

The work of teachers has historically been highly controlled, but one area teachers have been granted considerable autonomy is in instruction and planning. Teacher autonomy is a complex concept with important implications for both the quality of instruction and teacher persistence in the field. The rise of charter management organizations (CMOs)…

Digital instruments developed to support education practices add new dimensions to education governance. Among such developments is the digitisation of the national curriculum through instruments that govern teachers' planning practices. In this article, a semiotics of configurations approach is applied to analyse a digital instrument, the…

Few studies have examined how professional learning communities (PLCs) engage in collaborative inquiry over multiple years. This longitudinal study explored how a team of high school science teachers collaborated with researchers and district-based coaches in a PLC over 4 years. We examined (1) how the PLC, which was situated in a culturally and…

This paper offers insights into how mathematics education researchers can learn from preservice teachers (PSTs) by building upon parallels between adapting curriculum-making and designing research. The pandemic created learning opportunities for PSTs to anticipate mathematics curriculum anew and obstacles for researchers to study their pedagogical…

In the 1930s schooling in the United States underwent fundamental transformations, ultimately responding to the profound social, economic, and technological changes taking place in the early decades of the twentieth century. Students' social and emotional health needed support, especially for entry into a rapidly changing nation and world. One…

We use a narrative framework to investigate how mathematics textbook lessons can promote sustained student inquiry. Our analysis of four high school textbook lessons on the SSA congruence property, three of which contain explorations, reveals how explorations can promote problem-solving perseverance by inspiring readers to raise mathematical…