This study describes the social contexts in which four-year-olds undertake practitioner-assigned cognitive/learning tasks within preschools and the different experiences these contexts provide for children. Data was collected in 34 preschool settings in South East England, using a phenomenographic mapping of activities and social groupings during…

This article is drawn from the authors' book, "Judging for Themselves: Using Mock Trials to Bring Social Studies and English to Life," which discusses the effectiveness of mock trials as tools for learning and assessments. Mock trials are effective because they are challenging, authentic projects in which students create and then do…

Argument construction is a valuable ability for explaining scientific phenomena and introducing argumentation skills as part of a curriculum can greatly enhance student understanding by promoting self-reflection on the topic under investigation. This article aims to use argument construction as a technique to support an activity designed to…

The study characterized children's literacy, mothers' beliefs, and writing mediation of homeschooled compared to formally schooled kindergartners. Participants were 60 children (ages 4-6) and their mothers (30 in homeschooling). At the children's home, we assessed children's literacy, maternal beliefs, and video-recorded mother-child joint writing…

The focus of this research was on examining a play-based, child-centered instructional technique known as story telling/story acting (ST/SA) within a Canadian preschool setting. The goal was to examine the changes that occurred in the narrative features of preschool children's stories, and to investigate whether ST/SA fostered emerging literacy…

Educators need to change their practice to adapt to a shifting educational context. By visualising learning design decisions, this article highlights the need to capture educators' "tacit" knowledge relating to course material, activity types and workload, through employing learning analytics methods in order to analyse the learning…

Research shows most teachers teach as they were taught. However, distance educators lack a model or benchmark for online teaching because many of them have not taken online courses as students. Indeed, many studies on teaching online point to the importance of training for online instructors. Few studies go into specifics about exactly what that…

This research explores the various ways in which performative inquiry was implemented in a graduate organizational theories course within an educational leadership cohort at a medium-sized urban Canadian research university. Drawing on Fink's framework for significant learning experiences, the researchers used performative inquiry to enact the…

This paper discusses the fundamental issue of why small group activities are utilized in the language learning classroom. Although these activities have gained popularity in the field of Teaching English as a Second Language (TESL), supported by a sound theoretical base, few studies have so far examined the reasons why language teachers are…

Teachers often worry about how to optimise learning for students of Pacific heritage. To address the concern, this study sought views of junior secondary school students of Pacific heritage about what enhanced their learning. An innovative approach was trialled in focus group interviews which involved four Samoan teenagers as research assistants…

This paper describes an innovative model of teacher professional learning that has evolved over a decade. Working in a range of different school contexts, in conjunction with an ongoing engagement with the research literature, has enabled the development over three phases of a robust, yet, flexible framework that meets teachers' expressed needs.…

Disciplinary literacy is a newer framework for teaching and learning within the last decade. This qualitative study explored how seven teachers in one Midwestern rural school district defined and enacted disciplinary literacy in grades six through twelve. The content areas represented in this study include teachers from agriculture, art, family…

The Cara Syria Programme has been developed to support Syrian academics who have had to abandon their academic positions due to the conflict in Syria and who have seen their careers compromised as a result. The Programme offers a means to re-establish their academic identities and develop new skills through participation in the learning activities…

The senior high school curriculum has only been implemented recently by the Department of Education in the Philippines; therefore studies delving into teaching and learning in these levels are very limited including the negotiations of teachers with students through online resources. Using Goldwich's (2009) framework as guide, the negotiations of…

The topic of online instructors' roles has been of interest to the educational community since the late twentieth century. In previous studies, the identification of online instructors' roles was done using a top-down (deductive) approach. This study applied a bottom-up (inductive) procedure to examine not only the roles of online instructors from…