As caseloads for special education teachers continue to rise and as more students with disabilities enter the regular education setting (U.S. Department of Education, 2016), the need for co-teaching, in which a special education teacher and regular education teacher work together in one classroom to meet all students' needs, is significant.…

Ambivalence is a relatively little advanced concept for studying young people's engagement in education. We present a case study in which a teacher of a kindergarten-first-grade classroom works within an activity called a "playworld" to engage a child who had been excluded from certain classroom practices, after having been perceived by…

This article describes how the everyday experiences of a 1st grader pushed a teacher to confront gender issues in the classroom. Broadening students' ideas of what was acceptable for boys and girls is an important first step. (Contains 3 resources.)

Collaborative teaching is an option worth exploring at the elementary school level. The problem is many teachers lack the knowledge to effectively make these co-teaching relationships work. The purpose of this study is to identify effective co-teaching strategies to enhance collaborative teaching relationships. The study documents 1st through 4th…

The purpose of this study was to compare 1st-grade teachers' responses to professional development (PD) programs in reading that differed in means and degree of support for teachers' learning and efforts to improve their reading instruction. We compared 3 models of PD: the 1st model provided only seminars for the teachers, the 2nd model provided…

This study attempted to provide a systematic framework for phonics instruction for beginning readers in literature-based classrooms based on relative frequency of phoneme-grapheme occurrences found in three distinct corpora. The first corpus contained an academic word list. The second corpus contained the running text from 363 books identified as…

In this article, the author explores the implementation of the K-3 Reading First initiative and its recommendation for scientifically based reading curricula. During a time of high-stakes testing and accountability, this policy has emphasized a skills-based approach to reading and placed importance on scripted teaching models. Using data from a…

Traditionally, assessing student writing ability has often been product-focused. Advocates of child-centered process-oriented classrooms, however, suggest that teachers should also focus on understanding children's writing behaviors in the context of meaningful communicative tasks. In such an approach, writing conferences are one way in which…