Just as ready-made clothes may not provide a perfect fit for all bodies, math lessons may not be a perfect fit for all students. Published instructional tasks, including problems in mathematics textbooks, often need to be tailored to be meaningful, relevant, or accessible to each student. Ways are possible to take high-level reasoning tasks and…

Informed by the results of a baseline research study of regional citizen knowledge and understanding concerning watershed issues, a team of university faculty and classroom teachers designed and implemented a water conservation education program to address lacking areas of watershed knowledge. The authors developed age-appropriate, hands-on…

The National September 11 Memorial & Museum will be officially dedicated this September on the 10th anniversary of the attacks of 2001. It provides educational resources that explore the ongoing impact of the September 11th attacks and the ways that volunteerism and art aid in healing, recovery, and rebuilding. The 9/11 Memorial Museum, to be…

The numbers of school-aged children with life-threatening allergies that cause anaphylaxis continues to increase. Many states, including Washington, have responded to this by developing specific guidelines for school districts to follow in order to provide a safe learning environment for children with medical conditions that put them at risk for…

The U.S. Census Bureau has created a Census in Schools program called 2010 Census: It's about Us. The program will provide educators with resources to teach the nation's students about the importance of the census so children can help deliver this message to their families. The program will engage America's youth to help ensure every child and…

When the author attended a leadership conference last year, she started to reflect on her own situation. In this article, the author reflects on her experience and her role as a library media specialist who wants to be a leader in her school. However, to be a leader in a school, one has to offer a set of skills and abilities that others aren't…

This paper describes a particular lesson plan--the "Illustrating Project"--that has been successful for many classroom educators. The Illustrating Project calls for students, individually or in project groups, to illustrate some element of the curriculum via the media selected by the teacher. The selected media might be PowerPoint or some other…

Both local and global issues are typically dealt with in the Social Studies curriculum, or in curriculum areas with other names but similar intents. In the literature about Social Studies the imagination has played little role, and consequently it hardly appears in texts designed to help teachers plan and implement Social Studies lessons. What is…

A cognitive model of how teachers plan instruction was validated in laboratory settings but remained to be tested empirically in authentic situations. The objective of this work is to describe and compare pedagogical reasoning in laboratory and authentic contexts and across expertise levels. The "state-driven hypothesis" and the…

The Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge (TPACK) framework is a relatively new construct that offers a useful perspective from which to understand the development of pre-service teachers' abilities in teaching with technology. It is grounded in the understanding that if teachers are to effectively integrate technology into their…

The Digital Teaching Platform (DTP) brings the power of interactive technology to teaching and learning in classrooms. In this authoritative book, top researchers in the field of learning science and educational technology examine the current state of design and research on DTPs, the principles for evaluating them, and their likely evolution as a…

This article addresses the serious and growing need to improve science instruction and science achievement for all students. We will describe the results of a 3-year study that transformed science instruction and student achievement at two high-poverty ethnically diverse public elementary schools in Texas. The school-wide intervention included…

This paper reports on a year-long citizen science project that focused on improving learning for students identified as most at risk of not succeeding at school. This project was one element of a broader university-based aspirations Initiative which aimed to engage students from low socio-economic schools in rigorous learning in order to increase…

While pedagogical content knowledge (PCK) has been widely studied in the literature, there have been few studies that focus on content knowledge exclusively, and none that examine the interactions between new content knowledge and existing PCK. This study traced the interactions between five teachers' pedagogical content knowledge and novel…

The "Census in Schools Educator Update" is sent to educators and educational organizations periodically to keep them informed about current and upcoming census data and to provide ideas about how to use data in the classroom. This issue of the "Census in Schools Educator Update" newsletter includes the following items: (1) Have You Seen the Census…