The issue of professional development is receiving increased attention, as educators and policy makers are realizing the centrality of teachers to school reform and improvement. This paper describes research on book clubs as a mechanism for professional development and discusses how different study group configurations (i.e., preservice teacher…

This article describes the Systems and Global Engineering (SAGE) Project in which students collaborate with others from around the world to model solutions to some of today's most significant global problems. Stevens Institute of Technology and the New Jersey Technology Education Association (NJTEA) have teamed up to develop innovative…

Lab-centric instruction emphasizes supervised, hands-on activities by substituting lab for lecture time. It combines a multitude of pedagogical techniques into the format of an extended, structured closed lab. We discuss the range of benefits for students, including increased staff interaction, frequent and varied self-assessments, integrated…

Coyote teaching emphasizes learning community, long term mentoring, a need for learning, ownership of learning, heightened sensory awareness, storytelling, purposefully designed tricks, and the Socratic method to promote lifelong learning and a new generation of coyote teachers. Many of these methods are found in other educational philosophies but…

The representation of a variety of stakeholders' voices during the deliberation of public issues is vital for the proper functioning of a liberal democracy. This qualitative study examined an activity involving deliberation among children and preservice teachers in the United States. In the activity that we call partner journals, children were…

Technological tools challenge teachers' pedagogical activities. The use of information and communication technologies (ICT) in education should help teachers integrate new pedagogical methods into their work. This study explores macro-level computer-supported collaborative learning scripts as a pedagogical method to facilitate collaboration.…

Social reciprocity deficits are a core feature of the autism spectrum conditions (ASCs). Many individual with ASCs have difficulty with social interaction due to a frequent lack of social competence. This study focuses on using a virtual learning environment to help the deficiencies of social competence for people with ASCs, and to increase their…

In 2006, the authors' college joined the ranks of those offering programs for young adults with intellectual disabilities on campus. The program includes several inclusive courses in which typical students study together with their peers with intellectual disabilities. This article describes how 12 pre-service teachers who participated in an…

The widespread and increasing use of cooperative learning is one of the great success stories of social and educational psychology. Its success largely rests on the relationships among theory, research, and practice. Social interdependence theory provides a foundation on which cooperative learning is built. More than 1,200 research studies have…

Perspectives courses at Valdosta State University are charged with expanding undergraduate students' intellectual and attitudinal horizons by exposing them to both interdisciplinary and multicultural perspectives. The Religion and Culture Perspectives course focuses on how a diversity of religions respond to real-life dilemmas using the medium of…

Exchange is a collaborative learning application, originally developed for wirelessly interconnected Pocket PCs, that provides support for students and a teacher performing a face-to-face computer supported collaborative learning (CSCL) activity in a Single Input/Single Display (SISD) mode. We extend the application to support a single display…

The present study is part of a project aiming at empirically investigating the process of modeling the partner's knowledge (Mutual Knowledge Modeling or MKM) in Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning (CSCL) settings. In this study, a macro-collaborative script was used to produce knowledge interdependence (KI) among co-learners by providing…

Investigative- and cooperative-based learning strategies have been used effectively in a variety of classrooms to enhance student learning and engagement. In the General Microbiology laboratory for juniors and seniors at James Madison University, these strategies were combined to make a semester-long, investigative, cooperative learning experience…

Continuing interprofessional education is the means by which experienced health, social care, and other practitioners learn with, from, and about each other, formally and informally, to improve their collective practice and to cultivate closer collaboration. It applies principles of interprofessional education through media commonly employed in…

In this article, the author relates how she discovered that she was a book and paper artist after she had been kicked out of two high schools, went to art school, had a degree in Political Science and Women's Studies, had another one in Education, and was teaching school full time. After she constructed and stitched her first multisection…