The classic image of a college classroom often includes a professor standing at the front of a room or hall, often standing near a chalkboard or projector screen, lecturing to a room full of 30 to 100 students diligently taking notes. This model of instruction, often referred to as direct instruction, however, is grounded in somewhat-outdated…

This paper describes the design and outcomes of an educational intervention undertaken to improve the quality of delivery of a fourth-year engineering elective course--Industrial Wastewater and Solid Waste Management at the University of Queensland. The objective was to increase the level of active participation of students in planned…

We completed a qualitative study focusing on our students' use of Discussion Roles in our general and entry level online classes and presented the information at a Brown Bag presentation for University of Phoenix instructors and staff in October 2016. The following contains the results of the study including: (1) ways to use Discussion Roles in…

In 2007, Jake, the author's 14-year-old son, died. Though he had a known heart condition, Jake was vibrant and lived a life with no restrictions. The heart attack that killed him was unexpected. As a teacher, the author was left with the question of how to return to the classroom and what she would share with the students. This article explores…

Given the current interest in organizing teacher education around core instructional practices that help preservice teachers enact ambitious aspects of teaching like leading classroom discussions, this article investigates an example from the experience of a preservice teacher as she works on orienting students to each other's ideas. Resulting…

One purpose of classroom discussions is not to try to change people's views but to better understand why classmates believe whatever they believe. One of the best ways to achieve such deeper understanding is to hear the basis for other people's beliefs. In this light, the author modeled this behavior for students, which required revealing personal…

This qualitative study explores how emotions are experienced and handled during international service-learning (ISL) initiatives. It involved one focus group discussion and in-depth, semi-structured interviews with six college students engaged in a 10-day ISL project in Burkina Faso. Their accounts were analysed using interpretative…

For classroom norms to be effective, beginning with a coconstructed, inclusive, and equitable process (Kastberg and Frye 2013) can be helpful. This involves engaging all students in meaningful discussions about the norms and continually reinforcing these understandings throughout the year. However, early in the year, not all students are willing…

Instructors of online courses face unique challenges to ensure student interaction with course material. Sometimes, even the most exciting content is insufficient in an attempt to engage students. Online, asynchronous discussions offer promise as a means to increase student-to-student and student-to-content interaction and, ultimately, student…

This paper describes the process used to integrate active learning, group formation, and classroom discussion in a college-level business intelligence class. To assess the impact of active learning and discussion on learning outcomes, we captured student performance on their final data challenge term project across increasingly collaborative and…

The theory and practice of Wikipedia has a common heritage with professional history. In spite of the project being very new, the number and variety of its authors and the ambivalence of academia towards it, Wikipedians have created an encyclopedia that upholds high standards of scholarship and encyclopedism. Simultaneously it provides universal…

Researchers have been drawing attention to the power of collegial interaction for teacher professional development for some time. Yet collegial interaction should not be taken as a perfect solution absent of any drawbacks. In this study, the author examines teachers' collective construction of students to examine whether counter-productive…

What better way to engage fifth-grade students in science and engineering practices than to use paper airplanes to encourage them to question, explore, create, and test designs! This multi-day unit draws from a fourth-grade curriculum (Pearson 2012) aligned with the "Next Generation Science Standards" (NGSS Lead States 2013) used in…

In this paper we share a classroom implementation of a task about basis in linear algebra, which was originally developed for research about the topic. The task asks students to construct an everyday situation that captures the definition of basis, and then to critique it mathematically. Using this task, the original research study uncovered…

This presidential speech to attendees of the 2019 NCHC annual conference in New Orleans resituates honors education as a site of deeply radical practices and provides a call to action to honors educators both to own the transgressiveness of our pedagogical approaches and to extend that troublemaking project to processes beyond the classroom,…