The online discussion forum (ODF) is one of the many online interactive tools used for educational purposes. This paper discusses a study in a Malaysian university that examined the ODF interactions of students completing an assignment on paraphrasing. A class of 43 English as a Second Language (ESL) students enrolled in a writing course were…

The value of students publicly sharing and discussing their solutions to unstructured problems is widely recognized. This can, however, be pedagogically challenging. The solutions may be partial, unclear and unpredictable. For many teachers, particularly those new to working with such problems with their students, the improvisation needed to…

Many teaching strategies have been used to promote the development of critical thinking skills, among which the most frequently used are group discussion, concept mapping, and analytical questioning. The study aims to explore learners' voice and learning experience in the pedagogical contributions of these strategies to the development of critical…

This paper examines the role of critical mini-ethnographies as pedagogical tool in teacher education classrooms for transforming educators' narratives about immigrant and refugee communities. The process and the product of assigning critical mini-ethnographies in a graduate, teacher education course designed to help mainstream educators address…

Classroom discourse is structured by socially accepted ways in which knowledge is presented and by established procedures for carrying out educational activities. However, the underlying linguistic and social ground rules are usually implicit, for students as well as for teachers. The implicitness of these ground rules has been attributed to…

This article is based on a study which investigated the beliefs about English language learning of 661 first-year university students and their 34 English teachers at a Japanese university. The focus of the article is the shifts in reported student beliefs over a nine-month period of English study between two administrations of the Sakui and Gaies…

What happens when teachers, neuroscientists, and students combine their perspectives in a three-way dialogue about why selected classroom lessons were highly motivating? They discover that the factors that teachers and students believe important to student motivation are solidly aligned with insights from neuroscience. Author Kathleen Cushman…

"As we've attended professional conferences over the years, we've noticed an interesting phenomenon--the most animated, high-quality conversations often take place outside the meeting rooms," write Settlage and Johnston. Educators often feel frustrated when conferences are dominated by lecture-style presentations. To address…

Evidence that K-12 schools had successfully integrated conflict resolution into curricula (Johnson & Johnson, 2004; Stevahn, 2004) includes students' resolution of personal conflicts and improved academic performances (Johnson, Johnson, Dudley, & Magnuson, 1995; Stevahn, Johnson, Johnson, Green, & Laginski, 1997; Stevahn, Johnson,…

This paper presents a societal perspective on academic leadership by exploring the preoccupations of academics as citizens rather than as employees, managers or individuals. It uses a listening post methodology to ask "what is it like to be a citizen of an academic institution in contemporary Britain?" Three listening posts, comprising…

In this article we argue that social science instructors at all levels should openly embrace kinesthetic learning as an everyday pedagogical tool. The standard model of instruction at the college level relies on lecture, perhaps with special alternative activities (e.g., simulations) scattered throughout each semester. We argue that students…

The mean can be interpreted as a fair-share value and as a balance point. Standards documents, including Common Core State Standards for Mathematics (CCSSM) (CCSSI 2010), suggest focusing on both interpretations. In this article, the authors propose a sequence of five activities to help students develop these understandings of the mean, and they…

This study was carried out in three secondary schools of varying socioeconomic levels within the usual framework of tasks completed by students while studying towards a national assessment. The study examined the change in the nature of the interactions between students in group conversations, in the context of a film unit and a geography unit…

This article reports on the use of blogs in an online course over multiple semesters and analyzes the participation and meaning making between course participants. The authors used a combination of social network analyses and discourse analysis to show the patterns of participation and the types of meaning making over two iterations of the course.…

The importance of teaching second language learners the pragmatic norms of relevant communities of practice is widely recognised. Familiarisation with these norms is also an important aspect of socialisation for native speakers entering a new community of practice. This study focuses on pragmatic instruction of English as an additional language…