GoodSport is an after-school program for grades 3-6 that uses traditional and nontraditional sports, adventure activities, reading, writing, and group discussion to promote character development in the areas of teamwork, perseverance, responsibility, respect, and fair play. Two sample activities involving group discussion and problem solving are…

Explains the importance of student teachers performing the learning tasks they assign to their students in order to understand the nature and purpose of each task and its unique demands on teachers and students. The paper recommends guiding student teachers to develop their own abilities and view their teaching roles as nurturers of their own…

Examines how pseudonymous identification in a computer-mediated communication (CMC) context might: (1) reflect a motivation for gender-based status parity and (2) mitigate supposed gender-based communication differences associated with social interdependence. Subjects were 114 undergraduate students who participated in computer-based…

Traces growth of the Teaching Community model at Australia's Monash and Swinburne universities; the model uses group meetings to encourage professional development of teaching staff. Elaborates on the model's successes and why it has been powerful in bringing about change in an area known for resistance, and proposes conditions required for this…

Conversation is a basis for critical thinking. It is the thread that ties together cognitive strategies and provides students with the practice that becomes the foundation for reading, writing, and thinking. In recent years, proficient reader research has yielded information about what good readers do as they comprehend text. This article provides…

This article discusses two twentieth-century stock market crashes: the crash of 1929 and the crash of 1987. When this material is presented to students, they see important parallels between the two historical events. But despite remarkable similarities in the severity and many other aspects of the two crashes, the crash of 1929 was followed by the…

"Informal Forum," grounded in constructivism has been developed to foster active learning and deep understanding. Learning is an interdependent process, and is most effective when students construct their own meaning of knowledge. If one believes in the value of constructivist learning, it is important to teach how we preach in higher education.…

How should a teacher respond when a student makes off-base guesses about meaning in a literary text because that learner is trying to genuinely understand the story rather than find the "right" meaning? Aukerman argues that when teachers jump in to correct students' interpretations, they short-circuit students' processes of reading and thinking.…

A particularly innovative use of laptops is to enhance the music appreciation experience. Group listening and discussion, in combination with a new Web-based application, lead to deeper understanding of classical music. ["Appreciating Music: An Active Approach" was written with Joshua Austin.]

Teachers at two urban elementary schools with a history of low student achievement in reading met in weekly study groups to engage in structured dialogue about teaching practice. These groups were established through the support of the Urban Literacy Institute, a joint project of Wright State University in Dayton, Ohio, and the Dayton, Ohio,…

One hundred and eighty British secondary school pupils aged 11-12 and their six trainee teachers in five schools participated in an action research project, designed to improve the quality of children's group talk in English lessons, particularly their engagement in higher-order thinking through "exploratory" talk. The programme,…

Current research on language learning makes many claims about the potential benefits of small group work in L2 classrooms. With the relatively recent emphasis on students' perspectives, there is now a growing number of investigations that focus on learners' beliefs about the language classroom. In this study, 21 students and their teachers…

Utilizing an integration of social-cognitivist and socio-cultural approaches, this study--comparing the interactive processes among peers and their mentor in two contrasting groups--was designed to explore the reasons why two learning groups, engaged in an inquiry-based learning project with comparatively sustained discussion, produced vastly…

Meaningful discussion that facilitates reflective thinking can be initiated when learners raise thoughtful questions or provide critical feedback; however, generating effective questions requires a certain level of domain knowledge and meta-cognitive skills of the question-askers. We propose a peer-questioning scaffolding framework intended to…

This paper presents a new constructivist model of knowledge development in a case study that illustrates how a group of postgraduate students defined and evaluated effective postgraduate supervision. This new model is based on "personal construct theory" and "repertory grid technology" which is combined with interviews and group discussion. It is…