This article presents an example of a project designed to get children of different ages working together and working for each other. The project relied quite heavily on children creating a dramatic context and the author shows how the dramatic element has the potential to affect their learning in positive ways. The provision of a shared…

The role of an English teacher in teaching democracy to the young students attending English classes is discussed. The students are assumed to be producers as they improvise, collaborate, present performances of texts, engage in open discussions, and write alternative perspectives.

The author asserts her belief that teachers can turn movies into "a tool that allows students to understand content in new and intellectually challenging ways." She tells a personal story of using movies in her teacher education program, helping her students "learn and extend their understanding. However, they not only learned about content, but…

This article offers teachers and students an idea for a curriculum-related poetry break or "poetry getaway." The teacher identifies poems that relate to classroom content or themes; then, he gathers a series of objects that connect to the poems and places them in a suitcase. When it appears that everyone could use a poetry getaway, a student is…

The tides of globalization and the unsteady surges and distortions in the evolution of the European Union are causing identities and cultures to be in a state of flux. Education is used by politicians as a major lever for political and social change through micro-management, but it is a crude tool. There can, however, be opportunities within…

The typical use of science notebooks is for students to record information as they complete an investigation, writing down their procedure, observations, data, results, graphs, and any other factual information pertaining to their experiment. The author did the same, but also incorporated specific writing assignments to prepare students to publish…

We were recently challenged with trying to maintain the integrity and learning experience of our Physiology course, which included the use of long-answer, essay-style test questions, with a class size that increased over 2 yr by approximately 200 students. We reorganized the teaching assistant (TA) support structure in an attempt to keep the…

Popular culture provides many opportunities to develop quantitative reasoning. This article describes a junior-level, interdisciplinary, quantitative reasoning course that uses examples from movies, cartoons, television, magazine advertisements, and children's literature. Some benefits from and cautions to using popular culture to teach…

In the typical first-year mathematics course--whether it be calculus or a general education quantitative proficiency course--we struggle to help students see the relevance of mathematics to their own lives. Particularly in a focused course such as calculus, there is a danger that students see mathematics as an isolated subject, with applications…

This paper explores one way that teachers can develop creativity within potentially limiting confines and pressures of curriculum guidelines. The researcher considers the inclusion of film as a creative, engaging and effective strategy for teaching reading using data from a small-scale research project. Hypotheses are based on analysis of…

"The Chemedian and the Crazy Football Match" is a comic strip developed by the authors to bring humor to aspects of the UK primary science curriculum. The comic strip was tested in six English primary school classes (years 3-5; ages 7-10); over 150 children participated in the project, together with six teachers. Children found the comic…

Children's learning involves, in the simplest terms, assimilating knowledge and understanding and acquiring skills though being, doing and feeling. This requires a connection at a personal level. Furthermore, learning is given to fluctuation determined by the needs of the individual and the requirements of the educational system. This research…

Common questions that children ask can promote creative thinking. The question, "What will happen if...?" can set the stage for creative problem solving by encouraging the use of the scientific method. The scientific method involves learning how to hypothesize, recording procedures for experimentation, developing skills in observation and data…

The common assumption that teacher evaluation has a positive impact on the improvement of teaching is challenged. Critical challenges to the assumed contribution of teacher evaluation to learning originate from at least three areas of scholarly work: (1) revisionist/Marxist literature, which describes educational structures including teacher…