By assessing student engagement with learning tasks along with students' understanding of subject matter before and during teaching, teachers are able to shift their teaching approaches through improvisational pedagogical reasoning in real time. However, if a teacher does not know how to respond to students' cues, their capacity to effectively…

This study explores preservice teacher attributions to children's behaviors portrayed in specific emotion-laden school scenarios. Participants included 178 preservice teachers from three universities. The preservice teachers viewed video vignettes of Black and White child actors in six different school scenarios. Our team constructed two themes…

Emotions and the intellect interact and affect the quality of learning significantly, for better or for worse. This is often ignored or seen as irrelevant for teaching practices. A training package for teachers of older students was constructed to support kinds of practice which took emotions into account in planning and the classroom. In the…

Reform documents like the Next Generation Science Standards call for the integration of science practices and content. One such framework that leverages science practices to support learning of content and practices is the Science Writing Heuristic (SWH). This study examined where 33 teachers focused their attention over the course of a 3-year…

We report on a study of decision-making in mathematics lectures. The data comes from accounts of classroom incidents written over two academic years by three university mathematics lecturers who set out to reflect on, and improve, their practice by collectively engaging in a professional development project using Mason's Discipline of Noticing.…

The classroom is an emotional place. Students can be excited during studying, hope for success, feel pride in their accomplishments, be surprised at discovering a new solution, experience anxiety about failing examinations, feel ashamed over poor grades, or be bored during lessons. In addition, social emotions play a role and students also bring…

The idea that teaching practices could be improved through better data systems has captured the imagination of policy makers, researchers and foundations. However, the concept of data use itself is so ill-defined as to suggest that it is more of a panacea than a coherent reform proposal. This paper examines the concept with an eye toward what we…

Using Expectancy Violations Theory as a framework, this study examined students' perceptions of how teachers manage compulsive communicators (CCs). College students (N = 265) were given one of three scenarios describing a teacher managing a compulsive communicator. After reading the scenario, students were asked to rate the expectedness of the…

Methods for encouraging student questions and replying to them are discussed. (JD)

National Council of Teachers of Mathematics (NCTM) standards recommend interactive classroom discourse, including student questions and initiatives, rather than teacher-centered recitation structures, such as the traditional initiation-reply-evaluation sequence (IRE). This study explores how student questions and initiatives arise during a…

Process reinforcement is proposed as a reinforcement method that is more comfortable, personal, comprehensive, and interactive than traditional behavior modification. Process reinforcement strengthens desired behaviors by engaging learners in a one-on-one examination of how they achieved correct responses and by practicing comfortable eye contact…

Explains a method of reflecting on behavioral incidents that arise in classroom settings in order to improve teachers' responses to troubling student behavior. Suggests that by combining the process of critical reflection with an understanding of how conflict develops, teachers can improve the way they react and respond. (PM)

The study examined how adding students with learning disabilities (LD) to regular education classrooms changed the behavior of nonhandicapped students and their teachers. Initial observations were of mainstream classes containing no learning-disabled students. Observations were again conducted after LD students had been mainstreamed for 8 months.…

A study was conducted (1) to investigate factors that influence an instructor's choice of behavior when confronted with incidents of students' poor communication performance, and (2) to demonstrate how attribution theory can be used as a vehicle for describing and understanding the causes of instructor reactions or behaviors. The study sought to…

This descriptive study explored understandings of five learners in a third-grade mathematics class during a year in which their teacher attempted to change her teaching method. The study also examined the teacher's self-images of teaching while using the new discourse-based approach. Data was obtained from: (1) interviews with the teacher…