In this article, I offer a story, rendered in creative nonfiction, of my experience as a young and flustered college professor challenged by a defiant and disruptive graduate student. The story is followed by a critical reflection of the experience where I examine the role of communication and culture in regard to classroom disruptions and assess…

This author discovered that his most powerful tool in the classroom was not to lecture, but to stop speaking at all. The effect of the resulting silence was even more positive than he could have imagined.

This paper explores the use of instructor verbal immediacy behaviors for on-line classes. Specifically, it demonstrates how instructor verbal immediacy behaviors found in face-to-face classes can also be displayed for on-line classes. It is argued that self-determination theory describes identification of the student as an important role in the…

In this article, the author talks about how to encourage classroom participation with empty extrinsic rewards. He uses "bonus points" in awarding students for particularly interesting or well thought-out contributions to the class discussion. These bonus points have absolutely no effect on the student's course grade. But the students respond…

The writers describe how apparently ordinary decisions about what to say when talking with children can have substantial effects on their learning and development. The language we use with children influences, among other things, who they think they are, what they think they're doing, the relationships they have with others, the strategic…

The article focuses on pedagogical practices of recognition and esteem (Wertschatzung) and on the question of how those practices can be appropriately studied and epistemologically grasped. The investigation involves an inner-city elementary school in a socio-economically problematic district. With regard to the communication forms in this…

This paper distils 24 years of classroom research into promoting quality learning in science classrooms to develop an overall framework for better understanding and describing both the learning and the teaching approaches that stimulate and support it. For me, quality learning is characterised by adjectives such as informed, purposeful,…

School is an institution that plays a significant role in a child's life. Being an active employee in this institution, a teacher should be democratic, tender, patient, reliable and humorous to his/her students during the interaction and communication processes so that the teaching and learning processes are affected positively. It is important to…

Economic and market globalization in the United States has engendered a multicultural learning environment that challenges both faculty and students. Diversity in the classroom is further complicated by nonverbal communication, which impacts on students' attitudes toward faculty members. Because today's classrooms are changing and undergoing rapid…

This article reports on an action research project in which two New Zealand classroom teachers worked with a university researcher to investigate the effects of their knowledge, thinking, and beliefs on the ways in which they mediated students' learning in teacher-student interactions. Working in a small community of practice over a two-year…

The inexperienced teacher should begin the year with a plan grounded in information from effective classroom models. Knowledge of what activities to select, in what sequence to place them, and how to communicate with students about the selected activities might relieve much of the doubt and anxiety that can cloud professional judgment and…

Describes what a teacher learned when she asked her first-grade students weekly to recall what the teacher said to them. Notes lessons learned from doing this--children's work, behavior, attitudes and lives are all mixed together; children are listening even when they seem inattentive; and every category of response was connected to the teacher's…

Discusses a classroom where children from many cultures use talk to share and discover the "big" questions in their lives and where the teacher discovers what the critical issues for her and her students really are. (RS)

Defining teaching as "the way we bring ourselves to the learners" at the current moment, this paper describes "Enterprise Talk," a measurable, practical guide for talking to children in times of difficulty and responding with effective positives. After discussing how teachers teach (i.e., teachers model; teachers inform;…

Discusses what was discovered by "Journal of Blacks in Higher Education" staff who sat in on some of Dr. Leonard Jeffries' classes following his freedom of speech court victory against City College of New York. Observations disclose that racially biased and controversial topics are presented in part by Jeffries' lecturers and by his…