Enhancing the attitude of camp staff involves hiring staff that already have good attitudes, training staff in small groups that then train the rest, using the power of story, removing structural barriers, helping people understand how their actions influence organizational outcomes, identifying "termites," and placing a weak counselor…

Special education policy requires schools to make disciplinary decisions concerning students with disabilities within a multidisciplinary team. In order to respond to this mandate, teacher educators must ensure that teachers have group collaboration and decision making skills. This article describes a multimedia problem-based learning module…

Good manners and false protests of ignorance about American history cloak underlying anti-American sentiments among students. Behind the facade, a jumbled set of emotions inform their discomforted imaginations. They are offended by the patronizing and condescending attitudes of Americans when the latter comment on, or intrude into, the outer…

This qualitative cross-case study explored the experiences that learners describe within online collaborative groups. The study context was a fully online graduate course on adult learning. The findings suggest that the small online groups demonstrated dynamics and process that are characteristic of individual growth and development and group…

The Sleepy Lagoon Defense Committee originated as an ad hoc committee and evolved to a broad-based movement for legal justice on behalf of seventeen youth convicted of murder and assault charges in connection with the Sleepy Lagoon case in Los Angeles in January 1943. This essay chronicles the multidimensional organizing to shift public opinion in…

Effective teaching is not intuitive. Whether new teachers come to the classroom as a second career or directly from a teacher education program, they all share the need for support and belonging. Establishing a learning community that values the ideas and experiences of all its members will sustain new teachers through their early years. Without a…

This account draws on the experience of five final-year students of human communication and one tutor from the Manchester Metropolitan University who conducted collaborative research into life stages. The research was personally developmental for all those involved and resulted in an increased sense of personal power. The authors discuss the use…

This study focuses on collaboration between student musicians in a wind quartet, saxophone quartet and string quartet. Devised as an explorative investigation using observation and interview methods, the roles of student musicians are defined within and across quartet rehearsals over a period of four weeks. The data indicate that there are common…

In 2004, a group of high school students at a private American school in Mexico City started the first gay-straight alliance in Mexico. A small group of conservative parents and a Mormon principal organized in opposition. This paper details the students' struggle to keep their club and offers lessons learned about student activism, school change,…

This study focused on the nature of interpersonal understanding in 4- and 5-year-olds. Early childhood constitutes a critical transition period during which children become able to understand their own and others' "inner world" as it relates to actions. A neo-Piagetian theoretical and analytic framework was used to study children's understandings…

Collaborative peer learning environments have received increasing attention in classrooms due to the potential for improving learning and achievement. Yet previous research shows that not all students benefit from the collaborative experience. This paper explores the nature of helping behavior within peer-directed small groups that may be most…

In this research note we explore how children construct their identity in the context of a literacy practice: developing written and audio-visual texts in small-group situation to be published on the Internet. Through their dialogue, a shared identity is growing on the context, and every children create an identity as member of a community in…

In this article, the author writes from the vantage point of a teacher-educator who has been engaged in the process of formal education all her life. While she has always loved the learning process itself, she has often felt a deep sense of alienation on many of the educational landscapes she has traveled. Her own alienating experience of…

In this article we show how management faculty have successfully incorporated teaching and research to better acquaint their students in organizational behavior classes with how groupware actually works in organizations and how to think through the ramifications of the groupware process in organizational decision making. The exercise is conducted…

Business schools often assign student group projects to enhance student learning of course content and to build teamwork skills. However, the characteristics of effective collaborative learning tasks, including group goals and individual accountability, are often not found in student group projects assigned in business classes. The current…