This article explores how teachers use talk to scaffold pupil learning by examining "critical moments" in whole-class teaching contexts. The critical moments represent those points in a lesson where something a child or teacher says creates a moment of choice or opportunity for the teacher, and the article examines teachers' responses to these…

While there is general agreement that conversational interaction can facilitate interlanguage development, much of the research on interaction has been conducted in experimental laboratory settings. Questions have been raised about the generalizability of the benefits observed in the laboratory to the classroom setting. The current research…

This paper examines how video can be used to help pre-service and in-service teachers learn to notice what is happening in their classrooms. Data from two related studies are presented. In the first study, middle-school mathematics teachers met monthly in a video club in which they shared and discussed excerpts of videos from their classrooms. In…

In this article, the author shares how she used journal exercises to unify her classroom. Students used cheap spiral notebooks and followed a few very basic rules: (1) Start out by writing for 5 minutes, increasing to 15 or more; (2) Read the entry to the class only if you want to; and (3) Use the given topic or write whatever is on your mind.…

Teachers often tell their classes that "there is no such thing as a stupid question." But this is not completely honest. Questions aren't asked in a vacuum; their intelligence or stupidity depends on a variety of contextual variables. The ideal question is the right one, posed to the right source in the right way at the right time for the right…

Learning is a changing phenomenon, depending on the advances in theory and research. This book presents a relatively new approach to learning, based on meaningful human activities in cultural practices and in collaboration with others. It draws extensively from the ideas of Lev Vygotsky and his recent followers. The book presents ideas that…

This case study discusses a collaborative three year project involving two school clusters located in the North Island and South Island of New Zealand. The project was named "Project ACTIVate" and its main thrust was to study how the use of the interactive whiteboard (IWB) combined with teaching, learning and research across schools. The…

This study examined the features of the classroom discourse in eight Algebra I classes from two urban high schools with diverse student populations. In particular, by using the discursive analysis perspective, the type of communication between teachers and students was examined. The study investigated to what extent teachers' patterns of discourse…

In this study, we explore language--specifically the use of Spanish, in a sixth-grade science classroom, where the district recognises English as the official language of instruction. The question guiding our analysis is: How is Spanish positioned in Ms. Cook's science class? Transcribed interaction from twelve weeks of videotaping is coded and…

Anatomy is recognized to play a central role in the education and training of clinicians, healthcare professionals, and scientists. However, in recent years, the perceived decline in popularity of anatomy has led to a deficiency in the numbers of new anatomy educators. The tide is now turning with anatomy once again taking its rightful place in a…

A university professor observes the use of a Native American stereotype by a cooperating teacher in an elementary art classroom while supervising a preservice teacher. She identifies ways that the teacher's words potentially harmed her students and reflects on her own role. This "teachable moment" is described, and characteristics of…

Teachers play a vital role in the classroom environment. Interaction between teacher and students is an essential part of the teaching/learning process. An educator, Flanders originally developed an instrument called Flanders Interaction Analysis (FIA). The FIA system was designed to categorize the types, quantity of verbal interaction and direct…

For this article we aimed to understand the emergence of English as a second language for a newly immigrated Mexican student, a native speaker of Spanish, enrolled in a mainstream kindergarten classroom, who was undergoing the "silent period" (Krashen, 1981). Applying ecological approaches that emphasize learners in relationship with their…

In order to become productive members of an academic community, it is important for students to master its procedural practices. By adapting Bourdieu's concepts of cultural capital, habitus, and field, we examined procedural practices of first-graders from minority and low-socioeconomic-status backgrounds in the context of student-led literacy…

Research Findings: This article is based on the premise that the field of early childhood education needs to begin to study the details of teacher-child interaction if it is to understand fully what aspects of classrooms foster development and to create effective professional development interventions. To this end, we report analyses of four Head…