Suggests three attitudes that teachers should cultivate to become good storytellers: awareness of the importance of telling stories, commitment to learning how to tell a favorite story, and respect for the listeners' rights to interpret the story for themselves. (AEA)

Describes how risk, responsibility, and love of creative teaching precipitate one teacher's educational experiences, asserting that as a culture, it is important to develop a genuine respect for the art of teaching and a demand for high quality creative teaching. Suggests that it is risky to encourage the notion that teachers are interchangeable…

Trumpeter Wynton Marsalis created a curriculum that focuses on jazz music, which he asserts can cure what ails today's students, because its unique musical characteristics (collective improvisation, call and response, solos, and unexpected rhythms) demand respect and patience as musicians listen to one another and collaborate. The article suggests…

Responds to criticisms of author's work on instructional design and creativity. Clarifies three points from the criticized article: (1) the role of the Dick and Carey model; (2) the role of the client in the design process; and (3) the importance of performance analysis of ill-defined problems. (JMV)

Describes the reaction of first-year composition students to a classroom performance of John Cage's 4'33" [his most (in)famous piece] and discusses the role of silence in the composing process. (NH)

In this article, a practical framework for classifying various economic education teaching methodologies is established. This framework contributes to the literature regarding economic education by fostering a better understanding of how various teaching methodologies fit within the scope of economic education while also providing educators with…

Once in a while, or perhaps once too often these days, a bright idea finds its way into the language of education. It is not so much a new theory of learning based on a critical analysis of the very best of what is known about an aspect of pedagogy, but a seemingly new idea, rooted in politics rather than pedagogy, and most commonly articulated in…

By awakening her creative life, Melissa McClain was able to help students do the same. Based on the experience of bringing her singing and guitar playing into the classroom, she concludes that "the most effective form of professional development begins with the self."

In this article, the author talks about Destination ImagiNation (DI), the world's largest creative problem solving (CPS) program, and describes how this program helps students. In many schools and communities, DI supplements or even serves as the talented and gifted program. CPS is also popular and appropriate for homeschool families because it…

This article gives examples of elementary teachers using physical models of function machines with their K-5 students. (Contains 13 figures and 4 online resources.)

All the general music books the author has seen teach the pentatonic scale, and achieve success with it, by having students play only on the piano's black keys. The trick to preventing this exercise from sounding simplistic or uninteresting is to teach improvisation in the A-flat Dorian mode. Using A-flat as the tonal center puts that center right…

What happens when children come across texts that push the boundaries of what they expect to encounter when they pick up a picture book? There exists a genre of nontraditional picture books, commonly referred to as "postmodern picture books," which is characterized by a variety of alternative literary and illustrative devices. Given that…

When designing lessons to meet the needs of our increasingly diverse population of students, educators need to rethink planning and structuring lessons so that all students achieve better results. Therefore, teacher preparation programmes need to prepare pre-service teachers accordingly. Within this paper, a new lesson planning template is…

The Earthquake Machine (EML), a mechanical model of stick-slip fault systems, can increase student engagement and facilitate opportunities to participate in the scientific process. This article introduces the EML model and an activity that challenges ninth-grade students' misconceptions about earthquakes. The activity emphasizes the role of models…

Acquisition of the host country's language is a basic requirement for the occupational and social inclusion of immigrants. It has been widely acknowledged that both the teaching and the learning of a second language are substantially improved by the communicative approach. A technique employed by the latter is that of role-play. This technique…