How can educators engage students in learning, thinking, and inquiring? One consideration is teaching with a set of two contradictory texts--texts that have some contradiction between them. The authors find that when students read these books in tandem, they show an innate response of actively wanting to learn, think, and inquire in powerful ways.…

Strategy educators have employed SWOT analysis for decades as a means of teaching strategy formulation to students. Despite this well-established practice, many scholars and practitioners have called for discontinuing it as a pedagogical tool for several reasons, including that traditional undergraduate students may lack the practical experience…

For many students, introductory physics is an enormous hurdle to cross in their educational careers. Studies show that many students struggle with basic vector concepts and hold misconceptions of fundamental principles like Newton's laws, ideas essential to the understanding of higher-order physics concepts and for achieving success in engineering…

The purpose of this article is to present and discuss two recommended sequences of learning the areas of polygons, starting from the area of a rectangle. Exploring the algebraic derivations of the two sequences reveals that both are valid teaching progressions for introducing the area formula for various polygons. Further, it is suggested that…

Despite clear interpersonal, physiological, behavioral, and emotional consequences, the "Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders," fifth edition ("DSM-5") and most abnormal psychology textbooks inadequately describe maladaptive anger. Although there is no recent published research on coverage of maladaptive anger…

Elementary students are expected to use various features of informational texts to build knowledge in the content areas. In science informational texts, scientific metaphors are commonly used to make sense of complex and invisible processes. Although elementary students may be familiar with literary metaphors as used in narratives, they may be…

Young children can engage in close reading, critical thinking, and historical thinking when age-appropriate texts are coupled with discipline-specific tasks. Prior knowledge is an impediment, though. Primary elementary learners simply do not have much of a historical schema. Because of primary elementary students' familiarity with Thanksgiving,…

Courses: This single-class teaching activity was designed for courses on critical communication pedagogy (CCP), gender and race, communication education, research methods, and visual communication. Objectives: By completing this activity, students should be able to (1) describe the principles of CCP, (2) examine critically how race and gender are…

Problem solving has been a major theme in Japanese mathematics curricula for nearly 50 years. Numerous teacher reference books and lesson plans using problem solving have been published since the 1960s. Government-authorized mathematics textbooks for elementary grades, published by six private companies, have had more and more problem solving over…

In ELT (English Language Teaching) departments, prospective teachers come across a wide range of methodological domains which are applied and theoretical. Most of the instructional patterns can be practiced in microteachings. Upon feedback, the mistakes can be corrected and the procedures reworked if required. Nevertheless, syllabus, which is the…

Viewing its use in language teaching mainly as a text corpus, this article examines the problem of the assessment of suitability of this material for use in the Greek language course in Cyprus schooling. The suitability of texts for use in language teaching is defined by four parameters, which are described in detail in this article: text…

This article suggests how teaching artists can develop practical coursework in audio playwriting. To prepare students to work in the reemergent audio drama medium, the author created a seminar course called Radio Theatre Writing, taught at Arkansas Tech University in the fall of 2014. The course had three sections. First, it focused on…

In this article, Wieland and Bauer discuss a teaching activity that helps students understand how meanings of work (MOW) are socially constructed through commonplace texts: children's books. The activity helps students consider how children's books shape future workers' understandings of what work is, what kinds of work are most…

In 1890, the United States government had no agency empowered to control the overall supply of money. Fifty years later, it had a full set of monetary institutions, including a central bank whose structure is much the same today. Further, it had enough experience to know both the promise and the pitfalls of monetary control. How did the nation's…

The divergence theorem, Stokes' theorem, and Green's theorem appear near the end of calculus texts. These are important results, but many instructors struggle to reach them. We describe a pathway through a standard calculus text that allows instructors to emphasize these theorems. (Contains 2 figures.)