In the United States, the student body is increasingly more diverse in ethnicity, family structure, and race; yet oftentimes libraries are not representative of these students. This dissertation aims to develop and provide a framework to help educators select books that reflect the lives of diverse students. In addition to diverse literature…

Popular online teacher curriculum sites offer time-strapped teachers lesson ideas and supplemental curriculum--but are these high-quality materials? Researchers Amber Northern and Morgan Polikoff examined several hundred of the most downloaded teacher materials for quality, depth of knowledge, and diversity--and the results might surprise you.

In our Open Educational Resources (OER) advocacy work, we have encountered various challenges considering formulating a vision and policy on Open Education and implementing these visions and policies. Among these issues are a lack of proper definitions and terminology and lack of support for formulating and implementing a vision and policies for…

Effective instruction for students with intellectual disability (ID) requires thoughtful planning and careful selection of instructional materials. One of the most popular websites for educators is TPT (formerly called Teachers Pay Teachers), an online marketplace that allows users to buy or sell instructional materials. The purpose of this…

While films are popular as teaching tools in social work education, to critique social inequalities, horror films have not been the conventional genre. This teaching note describes the creation and deployment of a course that uses horror films to address social justice issues as part of different critical reflection, which is linked to practice…

In the richly heterogeneous United States, teachers largely decide what students learn. Even in states where state boards adopt a long list of instructional materials, districts can get waivers to substitute their own choices. And even when districts do pick materials, teachers do not necessarily teach them in toto. This article presents how…

Providing opportunities for reflection is one way to gain a deeper understanding of teacher candidate's perceptions of diversity and how their perceptions regarding diversity evolve. We conducted a qualitative content analysis of reflections to explore teacher candidates' perceptions regarding instructional material selection. By prompting teacher…

The rapidly changing landscape of instructional materials in elementary education has involved both a wider range of available materials, particularly online, as well as increasing use of materials provided to teachers by other teachers on sites such as Pinterest and Teachers Pay Teachers. In this commentary, I outline three key shifts in…

High-quality instructional materials (HQIM) can make a real difference in student learning. But purchasing HQIM is only the first step in the process of ensuring that students benefit. The Guide to the Implementation of HQIM synthesizes advice from practitioners and researchers about how to encourage solid execution of plans and realize the full…

The author's eighth-grade ELA curriculum is rich with opportunities for students to bear witness to a variety of experiences. Besides the Holocaust unit, they read "Ghost Boys" by Jewell Parker Rhodes (2018) while exploring police brutality and segregation; "The Giver" by Lois Lowry (1993) while investigating government…

This study investigates EFL university lecturers' challenges when selecting resources to facilitate students' self-regulation. Using a mixed-method design with 89 participants from Thai universities in this research sheds light on lecturers' difficulties, such as time constraints and limited access to reliable resources. It underscores the…

Use the 6-step instructional approach and examples in this article to bring civics learning and understanding to your elementary students.

There is a recognized need to understand the current state of programming implementation in the Swedish compulsory school system. This study focused specifically on the implementation of programming in the school subject of technology for grades 4-6. In Sweden, the responsibility for choosing teaching and learning material lies with individual…

This study examines, with focus on statistical education, how intersectionality appears in didactic tasks for Brazilian school education, developed by IBGEeduca, an educational platform organized by IBGE (Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics). In this study, intersectionality was used as an analytical tool to help understand and explain…

Over the past few years, several states have begun to explore or pilot different through-year assessments to serve as replacements to the traditional end-of-year summative assessments that are currently the predominant source of information used by states to meet federal accountability requirements. While there are several different assessment…