Shares the authors' thinking about building classroom community and the importance of offering students choices within grade 2-3 urban classrooms. Discusses how an atmosphere of caring where students feel safe taking risks is the result of deliberate planning by teachers who realize that learning is indeed social in nature. (SG)

Lets the reader "listen in" as a group of four teachers search for a focusing question as they plan a focus study on the colonial period of American history. Organizes the authors' thinking, knowledge, resources, and predictions about what the students might bring to the table and what they might need from their teachers. (SG)

Describes a project that used a multimedia tool, Hyperstudio, to facilitate collaborative critical inquiry in the classrooms. Discusses the students' reaction, infusing academic rigor into multimedia projects, students' accomplishments and approach to challenges, and project evaluation. Sidebars list steps in conducting multimedia projects and…

Presents activities designed to help children experimentally determine what the dark areas of the moon consist of, and compares primary children's ideas about the moon with those of early scientists. (WRM)

Introduces The Traveling Scientist program which can be used as an extension to the science curriculum. Targets 1st and 2nd grade students. (YDS)

Presents a science unit in which students design and test a sample of concrete and later redesign it to improve the strength of their sample under compression. (YDS)

Describes the sociotechnical structures of the Inquiry Learning Forum (ILF), a Web-based professional development tool designed to support a community of inservice and preservice mathematics and science teachers creating, sharing, and improving inquiry-based pedagogical practices. Highlights the change in focus from usability to sociability…

Describes a project that applies problem based inquiry learning units to an introductory chemistry laboratory curriculum. Uses web technologies to support instruction. (Contains 25 references.) (YDS)

Reviews two dimensions in which science and technology share fundamental similarities: (a) the production and transformation of representations; and (b) the action-oriented language that describes the two domains. Illustrates what and how students know and learn science during technological design activities. (Contains 66 references.) (Author/YDS)

Introduces five approaches--problem solving/problem based learning, authentic assessment, writing and communication skills, peer and self evaluation, and fostering curiosity. Suggests that these approaches bring critical thinking to the learning process. (Contains 15 references.) (YDS)

Introduces the Inquiry Learning Forum (ILF), a web-based forum targeting Indiana preservice and inservice teachers for the support of developing a better understanding of inquiry-based science and mathematics teaching. (YDS)

In Hong Kong, early-years teachers face professional challenges in adopting a creative and child-oriented pedagogy in which play-based learning is central. The paper illuminates teachers' understanding of play, approaches used, difficulties faced, and their power in finding solutions. Six Hong Kong kindergarten teachers participated in an in-depth…

The music classroom is the perfect setting for investigative and imaginative inquiry--for teaching students how to talk about music. Because dialogue that is done well is too dynamic to be captured in a one-dimensional model, the ideas and frameworks in this article are merely intended to serve as springboards for eliciting richer discussions in…

This article contains short stories that involve positively focused systemic strategies. The three examples that provided in this article are all grounded in open-ended, asset-based inquiry about what is life-giving, generative and important for children and adults. In addition, each focuses on giving youth an opportunity to recognize the impact…

Few people are more curious about their worlds than young children. Why, then, do so many science lessons begin with questions supplied by adults rather than kids? In many published programs, lessons revolve around set questions, with step-by-step directions provided for children to follow. This approach seems to say that young children are not…