Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to deflate some of the pressure-orienting teachers toward following a curricular script. Design/methodology/approach: The authors connect effective classroom teaching and learning practices to a dialogic instructional stance that values local resources and student perspectives and contributions. The authors…

Mathematics educators and writers of mathematics education policy documents continue to emphasize the importance of teachers focusing on and using student thinking to inform their instructional decisions and interactions with students. In this paper, we characterize the interactions between a teacher and student(s) that exhibit this focus.…

Sexual violence is a serious and prevalent violation that is experienced by as many as one in three people worldwide. Professionals working in areas of health, social work, law, policy-development and other fields engage with survivors of sexual violence. Their knowledge of this issue is an important determinant in how they react towards survivors…

The authors have seen an inspiring phenomenon in certain classrooms--students thinking through their answers to teacher questions, responding thoughtfully to other students' answers, even self-correcting or providing more information after they've answered a teacher aloud. The strategy behind these student actions is a skillful use of "wait…

This paper reports on a teacher's and his students' responsiveness to a new tetrahedral-oriented (Mahaffy in "J Chem Educ" 83(1):49-55, 2006) curriculum requiring more discursive classroom practices in the teaching of chemistry. In this instrumental case study, we identify the intentions of this learner-centered curriculum and…

A study of teachers' responses to Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) in a graduate course in Literature and Education for Sustainable Development, at the School of Education, The University of the West Indies, Mona, revealed that ESD can change indifference to the "commons" to one of mindfulness about local and global…

Traditional classroom instruction consists of teacher-centered learning in which the instructor presents course material through lectures. A recent trend in higher education is the implementation of student-centered learning in which students take a more active role in the learning process. The purpose of this article is to describe the discomfort…

This study explored teacher questioning as a formative assessment strategy by examining the practices of teachers of English as a Foreign Language in Chinese tertiary institutions. It investigated how teachers deployed questions to stimulate student thinking, uncover students' current level of learning, and allow responses to inform pedagogic…

One way that people learn, remember and communicate is visually. We combine past experiences with new visual information to construct meaning. In this study, elementary teachers introduced their students to the peoples and places of the ancient silk routes using illustrations from two children's picture books, "Marco Polo," written by…

Teachers participating in an inservice class report their own personal responses to the use of poetry in the classroom.

Previous studies have indicated that a response-sensitive presentation was more effective than a random response-insensitive presentation. This study examined whether these findings could be generalized to a regular classroom environment. Implications of the results are discussed. (Author/MT)

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

Describes instructional use of a microcomputer version of the WORLD2 global population-ecology simulation. Reactions of students and instructors are discussed and a WORLD2 simulation assignment is appended. The BASIC version used by the author runs on Apple II, DOS 3.3, with 80 column board. (MBR)

Encouraging students to be more vocal members of the response sequence can assist teachers in writing stronger comments on student texts. The author conducted a small-scale study of students' reactions to response formats, finding that students preferred formats that allowed teachers to elaborate on their comments, displayed teacher effort,…

A brief description is given of the Bellack System, which is used to analyze the content and structure of discussion. The system identifies who speaks, when they speak, and what they say. Four types of pedagogical "moves" were identified by Bellack: (1) a structuring move--beginning a new topic; (2) a soliciting move--a question; (3) a…