Like wildflowers blooming in the cracks of city sidewalks, reflective practice celebrates the organic over the artificial. Inquiry-oriented teaching, rejecting logical-positivist methods, engages teachers in a cycle of thought and action based on professional experience. Teachers subjected to quality control pressures reduce their teaching to the…

The author describes an educational radio series developed for the British Broadcasting Corporation that aimed to provide informed discussions of community issues with interaction between experts and a live audience and to reach a wider audience via radio. The author concludes that the series was generally successful. (CH)

Describes the nature and procedure of individualized inquiry and provides an illustration of its use in one social studies classroom. Steps include problem definition, hypothesis formation, information gathering, data analysis, hypothesis testing, and drawing conclusions. Recommends that teachers select responsible, intellectually capable, and…

Discusses interviewing techniques for college admissions counselors. Suggests ways in which to be an attentive, genuine listener and evaluator for each prospective student. Includes advice on the following areas: purpose, query technique, listening, notetaking, humor, evaluation, and write-ups. (JBJ)

Presents activities that use the learning cycle to engage students in meaningful inquiries in the study of Mendelian genetics. Includes content-related background and teaching tips for each phase of the learning cycle. (JRH)

A multidimensional organization of hands-on science is described. Inquiry, structure, and experimental dimensions are used to define and classify hands-on lab activities. The outcomes from the three different types of hands-on activities are discussed. (23 references) (KR)

Two inquiry-based teaching activities that are structured to cause cognitive disequilibrium and enable the student to alleviate the disequilibrium with the resultant equilibration at a higher cognitive level are presented. The first activity uses a Cartesian diver and the second a short film in which students are asked to determine the main idea…

Defines dimensions of vocational thoughtfulness: transfer of learning, situated learning, and learning from experts who shape culture. Outlines potential areas of inquiry--empirical, interpretive, and critical. (SK)

Examines the roots of some disciplinary quarrels (cognitive versus social perspectives and quantitative versus qualitative research methods) that polarize thinking in composition studies. Notes that these quarrels act as obstacles to reading and evaluating research and to training graduate students to conduct multimodal inquiry. (MG)

Presents an interview with Jerome C. Harste, outlining a broad view of the relationships and interactions between literacy, content, inquiry, and curriculum. (SR)

Presents and discusses the following six questions to focus students' inquiry experiences: (1) What do you think will happen? (2) What actually happened? (3) How did it happen? (4) Why did this happen? (5) How can we find out which of these hypotheses is the most reasonable? (6) How can you relate the investigation to your daily life? (PR)

Argues that geography educators need to give greater attention to the teaching of professional ethics as part of their contribution to the education of responsible citizens. Introduces an approach that couples the case method with a jurisprudential inquiry model, asking students to resolve professional ethical dilemmas through publicly defensible…

Educators are adopting learner-centered instruction in which students, facilitated by technology, collaborate with peers and engage in problem solving and inquiry. This article discusses ways to use technology in authentic learner inquiry as an information resource, content contextualizer, communication tool, construction kit, and…

Total professionalism is based on 10 principles governing how individuals think, decide, and behave: connection, inquiry, focus on the future, clarity, inclusiveness, win-win attitude, accountability, improvement, alignment, and contribution. Possible board of education scenarios and dilemmas are presented to illustrate each principle. (MLH)