Background and Context: Computational Thinking (CT) is a skill all students should learn. This requires using inclusive approaches to teach CT to a wide spectrum of students. However, strategies for teaching CT to students with exceptionalities are not well studied. Objective: This study draws on lessons learned in two fourth-grade classrooms --…

Critical Discourse Analysis is a theory describing how texts are exercised in social phenomena related to discourse and interests in it. In the theory, language and teacher power are two important components to learn because they are areas of discourse learning. However, the topic of language and power is still rarely discussed, especially in EFL…

Academic success is contingent on multiple factors not the least of which is literacy and comprehension. However, research demonstrates that literacy and comprehension levels for traditional aged high secondary school students, as well as non-traditional adult college students threaten the academic success of these demographics. Identifying…

This interdisciplinary study investigates whether, and to what extent, grit (consisting of "perseverance of effort" and "consistency of interests") and classroom enjoyment are linked with EFL learners' willingness to communicate in a second language (L2 WTC), the final psychological step before actual English communication. To…

The focus in this paper is on the analysis of student-centered discourse through applying a discourse analysis tool that I developed to analyze data from an elementary mathematics classroom. The purpose of the analysis tool is to understand the impact of the complex learning system on the emerging classroom discourse. The minimum conditions for…

Background: This article explores the political impact of using gender neutral pronouns in the university classroom. Aim: We explore how the gender neutral pronoun 'they' denaturalises essentialist models of gender identity. We follow 'they' toward a consideration of the gender neutral pronoun 'it.' 'It' advances -- at the same time that it…

This essay explores the way that the social interactions of the classroom play a role in shaping sign production. It examines the talk of one second year Advanced Level English literature class in North London during their study of John Webster's "The Duchess of Malfi" through the lens of Volosinov's theories of language. It seeks to…

Student-generated drawing is a useful strategy to construct students' scientific ideas. For exploring ways to support student-generated drawing, we focused on the perspective of 'Norms' -- shared behaviour patterns desirable in a community. We investigated what norms were formed and how they emerged when students made drawings to explain…

In classrooms, the act of saying hello - the ritual of shaking hands or hugging, and taking the time to exchange information -- can enact relational values of "We"-ness, of belonging. In this paper we highlight how one second grade teacher's personalized and consistent use of greetings, and apprenticeship of students into how to greet…

This study explores variation in willingness to communicate (WTC) in English between whole-class interaction and dyadic and group interaction, and teacher interaction strategies identified to sustain students' WTC in whole-class interaction that primarily followed the initiation-response-feedback (IRF) pattern. Data were collected from a regular…

The study investigated the beliefs expressed by a sample of 206 Polish and Spanish teacher-trainees about the use of learners' native language (L1) in teaching English as a foreign language (EFL). Quantitative and qualitative data from a questionnaire revealed considerable differences between the two nationality groups in their beliefs about both…

This case study presents the efforts of three high school teachers to design and implement climate change lessons in alignment with the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS). Using three conceptual frameworks that organize the assumptions of the environment in the NGSS we examine how those assumptions influence teacher practice when teachers…

Many teachers labor to distinguish between productive and unproductive struggle; they believe that struggle is productive when it engages students in thinking and communicating metacognitively, which is when students think and communicate about their problem-solving processes, strategies, challenges, and successes. One method that helps ensure…

This study examines how grade 5 students engage with the aspects (construct and critique) of argument in an online asynchronous discussion combined with in-class wrap-up discussion. Grade 5 students in a rural public school engaged in a "human health investigation" unit using an argument-based inquiry approach followed by online…

Scholarly calls to reform science education for all students emphasize scientific sense-making. Despite the importance of sense-making, few strategies exist to help novice teachers learn to notice and respond equitably to students' scientific sense-making in elementary science. In this article, we report on a qualitative case study in which we…