Awareness of teacher scripts is of crucial importance to reflection on practice, and represents one means of widening the scope of classroom performance. The first part of this work provides a full description of three scripts employed by a novice science teacher within the topic of The "Structure of Flowers", and offers a detailed illustration…

There are many effective strategies that can be used to support student learning from expository text, but how do teachers choose and use them? The authors provide readers with a process for selecting instructional strategies that embed literacy instruction into teaching with content area text. A a veteran sixth-grade teacher is followed as she…

The field of Computer Supported Collaborative Learning (CSCL) includes designers who emphasize effectiveness, measured via experiments, as well as designers who emphasize context and conduct qualitative research on teaching and learning practices. We conjectured that these two different emphases could be fruitful combined in a research and…

Teachers are well aware that their primary challenge is motivating students. Through teacher research, the authors have found that reframing curricular topics as inquiry promotes engagement, literacy, and deep learning for all students, especially reluctant ones, and invites them into the classroom project as full and necessary participants.…

In traditional classroom discourse, the teacher controls the discussion, asking most of the questions and calling on students to respond. This model does not work well for the inquiry-based classroom, which depends on engagement, peer interaction, and student ownership of learning. In this article, the authors present an alternative framework for…

Teaching Personal and Social Responsibility (TPSR) is a pedagogical approach to the teaching of physical education that has been developed with the intention of helping students to become more personally and socially responsible. One prominent model that appears to be almost a natural partner to TPSR within physical education is that of Sport…

The author explores how student learning can be enhanced through the appropriate development of teaching skills. In his review of elements of best practice drawn from the literature, conference material, and action research, the concept of "connectivity" emerged as a recurring, implicit term. From this evolved the concept of "connection learning,"…

The production of simplified language materials (SLMs) is a widespread practitioner response to delivering a curriculum to a diverse student population across mainstream settings. This paper examines the approaches of two groups of teachers and support staff in producing SLMs. It firstly reports on SLMs produced by 33 practitioners, identifying…

This article creates the Teaching Methodology Instrument (TMI) to help determine the level of adult learning principles being used by a particular teaching methodology in a classroom. The instrument incorporates the principles and assumptions set forth by Malcolm Knowles of what makes a good adult learning environment. The Socratic method as used…

Current distance learning technological advances allow real and virtual classrooms to unite. In this program evaluation study, focus group, participatory action, and qualitative research strategies (Yin, 1994) were used to explore the quality and benefits of infusing elements of three distance learning modalities into the traditional…

Traditionally, in education and business environment, Information Technology has been seen as purely a support or operational tool. Advances in computing, information storage, software, and networking are all leading to new tools for teaching and learning and are also changing the paradigm for new initiative in the classroom teaching. The Internet…

Diversity is defined as differences in groups of people and individuals based on ethnicity, race, language, socioeconomic status, gender, sexual orientation, exceptionalities, and religion. Each of these aspects of diversity is a "culture" in and of itself. The goal of physical education teachers is to become "culturally responsive teachers" and…

This paper argues for an overt innovational shift in praxis, as well as classroom configuration in the ESOL writing class by calling for a move away from the current foci on process-based pedagogies for newcomer populations, to an explicit teaching of modeling strategies with concomitant practice opportunities provided in the ESOL writing class.…

The purpose of this paper is to introduce and explain a cooperative learning technique, Academic Controversy (Johnson, Johnson, & Smith, 1996), also known as Cooperative Controversy, Structured Controversy and Structured Academic Controversy, that has potential for use in education and other areas, and has support in both research and theory.…

Understanding biological structures and functions is often difficult because of their complexity and micro-structure. For example, the vascular system is a complex and only partly visible system. Constructing models to better understand biological functions is seen as a suitable learning method. Models function as simplified versions of real…