"Critical", "Criticism", and "Critic" all come from the age-old Greek word "Kritikos", meaning able to authorise, discern, or decide. In contemporary English, a "Critic" is someone whose job is to make appraise judgements, for example, about films, books, music, or food. It means giving a fair and…

Through the exercise of collaborative autoethnography, we propose intentional and purposeful dialogue can act as a pathway for transformative learning. We seek to first deepen our understandings of transformative learning, particularly for underserved students in higher education and second to advance autoethnographic methods, a method that…

Many researchers, authors, and thinkers submit that a teacher's self-assessment and personal reflections are the best means to evaluate and improve teacher effectiveness. In addition, several researchers, authors, and organizations have taken the time to develop and consider tools to assist in the process of self-evaluation as well as considering…

Research on teacher emotion regulation is typically conducted by outsiders and focuses on how emotion is regulated. This self-study was conducted by a practicing teacher to explore the lived experience of teacher emotion regulation and the many influences that inspire the need for such regulation. Throughout a 14-week semester, daily…

A joke among managers is that managing and leading people is akin to herding cats. People can be fickle and idiosyncratic and do what they want, when they want, in seeming defiance of all tenets of logic. For good or bad, people are led by the emotions in their hearts far more than the critical thoughts in their brains. But this does not mean…

The article describes a school program addressing the concept of body ideals and aiming for student involvement and reflection. It reveals how the use of clicker technology overcomes the challenge of getting youngsters to discuss a difficult topic. Through anonymous ballots and questions that allow everyone to participate, it is possible to…

This article presents a study of prospective teachers' writing about service-learning experiences. Focusing on three teachers' writing about their work with students who are 'at-risk' of school failure, this article outlines how Bakhtin's theory of dialogism assists in understanding the responsive quality of writing. Specifically, the article…

The author has been blessed with great mentors throughout her career. When she was invited to participate in the Leadership University of Mary Washington (UMW), a mentoring program at her institution, she did not hesitate to say yes. In this article, the author shares her reflections on mentoring.

Research dispels the myth that teachers peak as professionals early in their careers, hitting a performance plateau after only a few years on the job. While most teachers keep honing and polishing their craft the longer they stay in the classroom, a fair number do not. Over the years, research on how experts in a variety of fields have continued…

This qualitative study was conducted to understand the use and impact of the Texas Principal Evaluation and Support System (T-PESS) as a leadership framework and determine if patterns in leadership activities and behaviors could be observed and identified. Observations and interviews were conducted with four principal evaluators and four…

Examining critical incidents in the mathematics classroom is a useful way for pre-service teachers to understand the experience of teaching. This paper examines the development and trialling of variations of a novel affect-based critical moment protocol that enables preservice mathematics teachers to reflect on their teaching performance. The…

Mental health clinicians struggle with self-care; over time, lack of self-care and the accumulation of stressors can lead to burnout and compassion fatigue. Through the lens of self-reflexivity, journaling is one way a therapist can implement self-care by a process of self-monitoring. Using self-reflexivity, a different form of self-reflection, a…

As previous Texas Association for Literacy Education presenters and university instructors of literacy, the professors highlighted in this chapter knew the value of presenting at the annual conference and wanted to extend that opportunity to their students, challenging them to not only attend a state literacy conference but to also collaborate and…

The main objective of the research is to create and approbate a new way of reflection formation in future teachers, which would increase the level of classifying thinking to the theoretical one. The "Formation of equivalence groups" technique was modified to conduct the experiment. It was carried out both individually and in…

As music teachers, part of the job description involves the detection of student errors and the use of our experience and education to eliminate them. This article is an exploration of the role of error in the learning process, with the goal of recognizing mistakes not as an enemy to be vanquished but as a friend with much to teach us. Carol…