Middle grades teachers should create meaningful learning activities involving stimulating literature and interesting composition prompts. This article describes a unit in which eighth graders read short stories by Edgar Allan Poe. Using multiple learning and teaching approaches, they expanded their vocabularies, responded artistically to "The…

Technology is increasingly used to aid the teaching of statistics. Personal Response Systems (PRS) involve equipping students with a handset allowing them to send responses to questions put to them by a lecturer. PRS allows lectures to be more interactive and can help reinforce material. It can also allow the lecturer to monitor students'…

Writing in personal genres, like autobiography, leads writers to public voices. Public voice is a discursive quality of a text that conveys the writer's authority and position relative to others. To show how voice and authority depend on genre, I analyze the autobiographies of two writers who take opposing positions on the same topic. By producing…

Many undergraduate chemistry curricula are devoting increasing amounts of time to teaching technical writing skills. Significantly less attention, however, is given toward training students in nontechnical writing strategies. The ability of chemistry students to communicate effectively in writing to a wide variety of audiences is an essential (and…

When a person walks into any library media center, he or she will, no doubt, see lots of students busily working on classroom assignments. While these students may be focused and industrious, the real question is what drives their work, and are they learning? Student learning comes from active efforts to construct knowledge that requires them to…

The author, a teacher educator, likens taking an English class to playing a game, and by taking the metaphor seriously, he develops an innovative and engaging way to start off the school year. This article describes the classroom-as-game activity that he used during the first week of school. Using the concept of a game as metaphor for the…

Stovall makes an innovative deal with her students: Read 20 books this year and complete a creative project about each, and there won't be any other homework. Stovall describes her method, the projects, how it succeeded, and what the limitations were. (Contains 1 note.)

A paramount duty of education is to prepare young people for their role as citizens in a democratic society. Voting is one of the important responsibilities of a citizen but statistics indicate that young people often don't vote and don't believe they have a stake in the outcome of the presidential election. Storypath is a teaching strategy that…

Using participant observation, we describe/interpret the results of teaching a constructivist unit that empowered students in narrative writing and illustration. Participant observation methods included daily note taking, pre-post questioning, and photographing artworks. We analyzed students' stories and illustrations with borrowed and emerging…

Using the narrative inquiry research method, this self-study of my teacher education practices examines the influence of four simultaneous accountability reviews--a national accreditation review, a regional accreditation review, a university system review, and local campus review--on my personal experiences and identity within academia. The…

The Mathematics Education Debate is an assignment designed for and implemented in an undergraduate mathematics methods course for prospective secondary school mathematics teachers. For the assignment, students read and analyze current research and policy reports related to mathematics education, prepare and present their positions, offer…

The author suggests that it is impossible to motivate students. He said that in fact, it's not really possible to motivate anyone, except perhaps oneself. What a teacher "can" do--"all" a teacher can do--is work with students to create a classroom culture, a climate, a curriculum that will nourish and sustain the fundamental inclinations that…

This study examined online group discussion from students' perspectives to determine what characteristics students identify as meaningful to their online learning. Participants were 142 graduate students in the Southeast. The multiple regression results revealed that quality of online discussion was positively associated with communication media,…

This article reports on the types of scientific writing found in two primary grade classrooms. These results are part of a larger two-year study whose purpose was to examine the development of informational writing of second- and third-grade students as they participated in integrated science-literacy instruction. The primary purpose of the…

The growing time pressure that teachers face actually comes in two forms, both of which need to be resolved successfully in order for media literacy education to gain a real foothold in U.S. schools. First, teachers constantly face the challenge of trying to fit all of the content and engaging activities into the school day and school year,…