Focusing on teachers' perspectives, this report examines sociocultural diversity and teaching by reconstructing the talk of a group of 10 teachers from the Oakland and Berkeley, California areas who met weekly for a school year. The curricular focus of the group was the teaching of writing, but over time the discussions of difference and child…

Although interviewing looks easy, it is much more complicated than it appears, and generally, students are not taught how to conduct an interview. Planning and preparation must include research about the subject of the interview and the person being interviewed. Good questions build on the question before, make the person being interviewed think,…

A 9-month naturalistic study of 16 preschoolers' classroom literacy behaviors and a related study of one student's literacy activities at home examined book-related dramatic play as an important part of the children's literacy interactions. Analyses of instances where play was related to the meanings of the books the children had read indicated…

This Digest focuses on motivating the low performing adolescent in a remedial reading or subject area classroom--the idea is that students who are disengaged from their own learning processes are not likely to perform well in school. The Digest points out that such adolescents are often caught in a cycle of failure and that secondary teachers must…

This paper describes the mental model children have of their own learning, derived from their behaviors when learning a song. The basic assumption of the study is that behavior is an outward expression of a psychological entity. The song chosen for the study was a complex, unfamiliar Zulu song. Thirty-six children in three age groups participated…

Organizational learning is fundamentally a communication phenomenon and, as such, communication research is particularly well suited to contribute to the understanding of this occurrence. Three communicative processes are constitutive of learning organizations: (1) collective thinking processes, whose three components are collectivity, idea…

In a discussion of second language vocabulary teaching and learning, the premise is that vocabulary development from context should not be used as a teaching strategy exclusive of other methods, such as direct teaching through word pair translation; rather, these approaches should be seen as complementing each other. Several arguments in favor of…

The brain's architecture serves as the basic model for theorizing about how the brain works. Current brain research confirms earlier suspicions that thoughtfulness has a great deal more complexity than the simplistic left/right distinctions of earlier research. This paper draws on the work of Carl Jung to propose the brain-psyche model as an…

Increased attention in organizational theory on how to improve the design of a learning organization has indicated a need for the development of a theory on how employees learn in, and in relation to, organizations. This paper focuses on the part of the learning process that deals with how learners understand the object at hand, in this case,…

The instructional theory presented in this document provides an explanation and context for making instructional decisions. The theory's purpose is to facilitate continual inquiry in the real world of teaching; to facilitate the decision making role of teachers and researchers; and to enable teachers and scholars more clearly to describe and…

This paper demonstrates a method for constructing long variables using items that elicit partically correct responses across ages. Long variables may be defined by students at different ages (year levels) attempting common items within a test containing other items considered to be appropriate for each age or year level. A developmental model of…

A discussion of classroom teaching addresses two questions about how teachers learn to teach: (1) What do teachers know and how do they use that knowledge to do what they do in the classroom?; and (2) How do teachers learn what they know? In response to the first question, it is proposed that teaching can be seen from three basic perspectives: as…

The personal journal is a combination of class notebook and diary, a repository of entries which are recorded on a regular basis, are ungraded, and which remain confidential. As an instructional tool, the journal is virtually limitless. Studies have demonstrated the practical applications of journal writing for educators in the following areas:…

A conceptual framework is presented for studying the processes of metacognitive regulation involved in complex learning activities such as text composition. A method is demonstrated for analyzing text transformations as a means of making inferences about underlying processes of regulation. Data are from a study of four female sixth graders in…

The essence of the computer revolution is yet to come, for computers are essentially generators of realities. Virtual reality (VR) is the next step in the evolutionary path; the user is placed inside the image and becomes a participant within the computational space. A VR computer generates a direct experience of the computational environment. The…