In this paper we explore the dispositions towards "communal e-learning" of a cohort of initial teacher trainees within a primary post-graduate (PGCE) programme. We describe a one-year case study involving 154 postgraduate trainees in West London, working to meet the nationally decreed "professional standards" for qualified…

One of the challenges of teacher education is to train preservice teachers to deliver a wide range of literacy skills to a diverse population. This article describes a mixed methods research study into preservice undergraduate literacy methods courses. This research examined how online, asynchronously conducted discussions influenced and impacted…

This article describes the Tribal Paradise Project the author and her colleagues designed for their high school students. This project was a bold attempt to bring together the real-world skills of collaboration and online writing into one major, cross-school project. Adapted from the famous "Flimibuff" assignment cited by Ray Saitz on his teacher…

This study examines the production of topical talk in peer collaborative negotiation in an interactive assessment innovation context. The ability to stay on topic, to move from topic to topic and to introduce new topics appropriately is at the core of communicative competence. Applying conversation analysis (CA), we describe and analyze how one…

Leading a classroom discussion involves multiple components, including establishing norms for participation, assisting students in engaging in careful readings of text ahead of time, and modeling features of academic discourse. In other work, Grossman and her colleagues refer to this as the "decomposition" of practice--breaking down complex…

Although there is a push in education to increase the amount of technologies used in the classroom much of the recent literature emphasizes a need to investigate ways to improve the instructional methods used when incorporating technology in education. The focus of the present research is to investigate an instructional technique used in an…

This study was an attempt to explore how a critical literacy (CL) approach to reading development may contribute to EFL learners' personal development, and what their perceptions of a reading course with a CL orientation are. 25 B.A. freshman English Literature students participated in a reading comprehension course at Allameh Tabataba'i…

Within teacher education programs, the use of discussion forums offers potential for creating learning communities whereby participants can negotiate meaning and engage in knowledge construction (Lock, 2006; Murphy, 2000). To this end, the present article draws on the findings of a larger research project which focused on a discussion forum…

Restorative Practices (RP) in schools is a new and emerging field. Meeting in Circles to build friendships, develop emotional literacy skills, resolve conflict, or learn interactively are some of the core components of these programs. This article describes a 2-year study of 12 weekly Talking Circles organized under the auspices of a RP program in…

As a science teacher, I regularly use outside reading assignments (e.g., news articles) to help develop my students' understanding of topics addressed in my anatomy class. However, I have found that in simply reading texts, students often fail to (1) understand the context of the science discussed, (2) make the connections between ideas…

This article reports on an analysis of the effects of a quasinatural experiment in which 16 rural communities participated in public discussion, leadership training, and community visioning as part of an Extension program at Montana State University. Difference-in-differences methods reveal that key U.S. Census socioeconomic indicators either…

Researchers of after-school tutoring primarily focus on educational outcomes with little attention to the social dynamics of such programs. In our qualitative case study, we examined the nature of interactions among tutors in a tutoring program at a homeless shelter for families. Employing Bourdieu's concepts of "social capital" and…

One issue of concern to teachers is the effect of teaching strategies and students' cognitive style on knowledge construction via online discussions in social networks. This study aimed to explore which teaching strategies lead to better learning performance and which cognitive styles affect learning from teaching strategies based on online…

Isolation is often a problem in online courses. In this qualitative study, we used care ethics perspectives to design the social organization of an online course to foster the development of robust collaborative professional relationships. Redesign focused on two areas. First, we centered all assignments on complex real-world problems. Second, we…

Health care administration is a challenging topic to teach due to the inability for students to directly engage in many of the activities such as insurance billing, inventory, and ordering equipment and supplies. The objective of this article is to describe how a discussion-based meeting format can be used to engage students in health care…