This practice brief provides practical, research-based strategies educators can use to de-escalate challenging student behavior in the classroom. Despite the development of supportive, safe, and predictable school environments, students may, at times, become agitated, and their behavior may escalate to unsafe levels. With some advance planning,…

This qualitative study examines the semiotic meanings communicated through multiple representations in the teaching of an advanced undergraduate course in biology. Scientific discourse is intrinsically multimodal in nature; in other words, science is discussed and researched using multiple modes that convey meaning (Lemke, 1998). Therefore, to…

The COVID-19 pandemic has had a tremendous influence on higher education in America. While college presidents have led through multiple crises in the past several decades, this challenge is unique for both the depth of its influence (e.g., revolutionizing course and service delivery methods, financial upheaval and institutional closures, political…

This qualitative phenomenological study focused on the lived experiences of novice superintendents in Tennessee. Novice superintendents were operationally defined as superintendents within their first 3 years of performing the responsibilities and duties of the role. The researchers also examined the role the Tennessee Organization of School…

The goal of the present study is to explore bilinguals' intercultural style of requesting in a workplace setting and thereby contribute to the understanding of bilingual pragmatic competence. The relatively unexplored intercultural style hypothesis suggests that bilinguals show a unique pragmatic pattern related to but distinct from the contact…

Early-career special education teachers (SETs), often report feelings of role ambiguity and being marginalized from their administrators (Billingsley & Bettini, 2019). Dissatisfaction with administration is a leading cause of SET attrition (Bettini et al., 2020; Fowler et al., 2019). Special educators who leave teaching report feeling…

University student volunteering is prevalent in Western countries, but has rarely been critically evaluated by researchers. Little is known about the different ways in which student volunteer programmes are organised. Using a matrix constructed from the publicly available websites of all Australian universities, and 60 interviews with key…

Federal and state governments -- as well as philanthropists and foundations -- are being called upon to invest millions of dollars in the public-school system to help schools and districts navigate the impact of the pandemic on student success. The challenges facing education leaders are immense and complex. The learning loss for students is…

Courses: Interpersonal Communication, Fundamentals of Human Communication, Communication Theory, Public Speaking, and Intercultural Communication. Objectives: After completing this single-class activity, students will be able to (1) describe how meaning is created through symbolic interaction, (2) explain how the self is created through symbolic…

The era of mobile media has placed communications convergence at a new stage. The importance of studies about mobile communications has been growing increasingly over the last years. This growth is connected to the increase in the access to contents through new devices. The last ten years have seen a process of acceleration in mobile technology…

This study examines the effectiveness of images on warning signs that communicate risk and risk avoidance in public spaces. Specifically, I compared data from 749 survey responses to determine whether the use of images can increase the effectiveness of a warning sign in a public space. Although the findings indicate that image-based warning signs…

The 4Ps activity provides a unique approach to first-day class introductions and creates a positive classroom climate that encourages student engagement. The assignment generates initial self-disclosure that facilitates interpersonal and group communication throughout the semester. Additionally, the activity can be used as a unit activity with a…

Language is a communication tool for every human being and is used to convey ideas, messages, intentions, feelings, opinions to others or even to meet daily needs. Intercultural communication is a communication that frequently occurs in the community. Pragmatics is a branch of linguistics that discusses aspects of language as a communication tool.…

Courses: Interpersonal Communication, Health Communication. Objectives: In this single-class activity, students gain awareness and practice in suspending judgments about "difficult" people in order to understand the reasoning behind certain objectionable behavior.

Background: This study is a longitudinal follow-up to prior work examining the important pragmatic skill of communication repair (i.e., the ability to respond effectively to a request for clarification of an unclear message) across three neurodevelopmental disabilities in which language skills are impaired: fragile X syndrome with and without…