The purpose of this article is to report our preliminary work on student-centered teacher preparation to promote school success among culturally and linguistically diverse learners. The authors believe that teacher education programs need to be very purposeful in their approach to multicultural literacy teacher education. Drawing upon Vygotskian…

Information literacy instruction presents a difficult balance between quantity and quality, particularly for large-scale general education courses. This paper discusses the overhaul of the freshman composition instruction program at the University of Maryland Libraries, focusing on the transition from survey assessments to a student-centered and…

This unique Australian paper presents a study involving a Western Victorian District High School year nine mathematics class using social justice pedagogy to learn Mathematics. The class was comprised of gifted students, mainstream students and students who had diagnosed learning disabilities, all key foci in Australian Education research. The…

The degree of affiliation which pupils develop towards their schools is an important factor in their engagement and success. It has also been a matter of concern at the time of transfer from primary to secondary school. This article describes the development of a brief method for identifying the degree of affiliation which pupils feel, and also…

Most English language learners are from families that have recently immigrated to the United States-and many of those families traveled here at tremendous risk to seek better education for their children. It's important for classroom teachers to make building relationships with the families of ELLs a priority. Breiseth asserts that the most…

A 3rd-grade teacher used literature to help her immigrant students grapple with some of the larger issues related to immigration. Through the story of one Latino student, the teacher shares the literature that she used and how one student responded.

For students to learn optimally, teachers must design classrooms that are responsive to the full range of student development. The teacher must be adaptive, but so must each student and the learning culture itself. In other words, adaptive teaching means constructing a responsive learning culture that accommodates and even capitalizes on diversity…

In this paper, the author expresses concerns regarding the extensive use of case studies in the college classroom and advises college and university faculties to be more careful in their selection and use of case studies as an effective­-based method of teaching. The author communicates the important role that case studies play in teaching and…

Student-centered learning has been conceived as a Western export to the East and the developing world in the last few decades. Philosophers of education often associate student-centered learning with frameworks related to meeting the needs of individual pupils: from Deweyan experiential learning, to the "pedagogy of the oppressed" and…

Instead of being a simple concept, "student-centered learning" is actually a complicated and messy idea that has encompassed a wide range of sometimes fundamentally different meanings, each holding important implications for education. Thus, educators need a more nuanced and more productive framework for conceptualizing…

A few years ago the author conducted a survey of a representative cross-section of a junior class to gather information about how students define success. The responses were categorized by gender and academic level and it was found found that every group defined success primarily as getting the grades necessary for admission to college. The…

Common arguments for integrating the arts into mathematics courses include the arts fostering student creativity, improving academic achievement, and encouraging transfer between subjects. Research supporting these arguments is limited and carries layered complexities--such as what constitutes creativity and transfer, and whether they can be…

To improve the student learning outcomes of an introductory Human Anatomy and Physiology course we have implemented many changes over the last two years. In this study, the third of a three-part series, we present data from surveys collected and analyzed during the spring semester of 2018 at the University of Northern Colorado. The results reveal…

This essay focuses on my experience studying Stephen Kelman's "Pigeon English" with Year 9 and the complexities of that particular classroom. It seeks to look beyond the labels that are often imposed on students and to show the importance of examining the particular individuals, both as learners and as people with their own lives outside…

In this paper, we examine the role of the instructor during student-centered approaches, specifically those that are problem-centered, to outline effective strategies that are valuable for facilitating discussions. After describing the role of the instructor in each phase of implementation, from planning to evaluation, we discuss specific…