In the modern American politics classroom, ideological and partisan conflict have the capacity to interfere with a healthy classroom environment. This problem is increasingly apparent when students engage questions at the heart of U.S. Constitutional design. By asking students to inhabit fictional roles with preferences and attitudes that may…

Open classroom climate for discussion (OCC) is consistently associated with positive civic outcomes for students, but research on the determinants of OCC primarily focuses on individual- and school-level indicators or uses qualitative or non-representative samples. This study considers how teacher instructional practices influence the presence of…

A commonly proposed, but naïve approach to solving the debates over curriculum and pedagogy would be to merely go with what the research says "works," but educational debates are not so easily solved. Educational decisions are at the heart value judgements, and to claim that research can tell us what to do represents an ethical and moral…

The idea of the classroom as a 'safe space' has been popular in education for at least two decades. More recently, the term has also been used by religious education scholars not least in the wake of the use of the term in the influential Council of Europe publication 'Signposts'. In this article, I want to question the usefulness of the term…

This new publication sets forward the PISA framework for global competence developed by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), which aligns closely with the definition developed by the Center for Global Education at Asia Society. Based on the Center's extensive experience supporting educators in integrating global…

This paper describes a case study of two pure mathematicians who flipped their lecture to teach matrix determinants in two large mathematics service courses (one at Stage I and the other at Stage II). The purpose of the study was to transform the passive lecture into an active learning opportunity and to introduce valuable mathematical skills,…

The increasing ubiquity of PowerPoint in the university classroom raises complex questions about pedagogy and the creation of dynamic and effective learning environments. Though much of the sociological teaching literature has focused on engagement and active learning, very little of this work has addressed the presence of PowerPoint in sociology…

This case study examines a U.S. History class where a veteran teacher uses challenging primary source documents and a debate to encourage his students to think critically about history. The teacher is knowledgeable about the subject matter and articulates a clear purpose for teaching. Surprisingly, the author finds that the teacher's methods,…

The educational setting, in particular the college classroom, is a natural training ground for fostering critical thinking skills for the 21st century worker. In this study, debate is explored as a technique to help students attain mastery of content and critical thinking skills considered key to working in the field of rehabilitation counseling.…

Debate has been a well-known pedagogical technique since there have been written records about teaching and learning. Originally employed for learning philosophy and theology, debate was later used in the fields of history, law, literature, and the physical sciences. This author asserts, however, that, although the benefits of debate are…