Designed for adult educators in various settings who are seeking to improve as teachers, this book describes a process adult educators can use to examine their beliefs about teaching and current teaching behavior in depth. It is intended to guide them through an exploration of who they really are as teachers, and then, through experiential…

Using a sociocultural framework to generalize principles about how to work within an emergent reader's zone of proximal development, this study analyzed teacher support and forms of teacher prompts in one-on-one Reading Recovery tutorials with first-grade students at risk of reading failure. The ways that five Reading Recovery teachers supported…

A second-grade teacher wanted to enable her students to look at several pieces of their own writing, pick the best piece, and write an explanation as to why it was chosen. She began by developing a series of probing questions that the students could ask themselves as they evaluated their own writing. So that students could fully understand the…

A study examined the concerns, problems, and experiences when teachers change from a traditional skills classroom to a whole language classroom. Subjects, 162 of 400 K-12 teachers from several Ohio Teachers Applying Whole Language groups, responded to a questionnaire (for a return rate of 40%). Results indicated that: (1) the most important…

The portfolio approach to teaching writing brings the writing process into the classroom and enables the new teacher--and all teachers--to see writing from a new perspective, to truly be collaborators and coaches with their students. A college writing teacher uses portfolios and plays the role of evaluator as well as the responder in three courses…

Except in small doses, the language and literature of Native Americans remains invisible in the American school curriculum. Undergraduate literature classes fail to offer works by Native Americans just as the undergraduate curriculum offers few courses in Native American literature. Graduate schools frequently define minority literature as…

A continuing longitudinal study examined students' perceptions of their learning and motivation in a whole language classroom setting. Subjects, 14 fifth- or sixth-grade students who collaborated in the inquiry as co-researchers, were interviewed in depth. The mixed fifth- and sixth-grade classroom at the "Willow School" in southern…

Although "flaming" (language and behavior considered outrageous in a classroom context) is a rupture of teacher authority, it can be used in the classroom as a viable pedagogical tool. A student in a basic literature course read a long and sexually explicit narrative in rhymed couplets. The rupture in the normal classroom environment…

A practicum was designed to assist 30 kindergarten teachers in increasing the authentic reading experiences of kindergarten students in their classrooms. The goal of the practicum was two-fold: to provide the teachers with alternative instructional strategies to drill and practice basic reading skills; and to provide adequate, developmentally…

That the emergent literacy perspective is gaining influence in the United States as a way of studying children's literacy acquisition. This report interprets emergent literacy research in light of the Vygotskian theory of learning and development. First, the report compares the emergent literacy perspective to the more traditional reading…

This paper describes the case of Cassandra Singer, a third-grade teacher finishing her first year of using Comprehensive School Mathematics Program (CSMP), an innovative mathematics curriculum. Drawing from interviews and observations, the document explores relationships between Cassandra's knowledge and beliefs about mathematics, how it is taught…

A study attempted to delineate the parameters of practice that are referred to as literature-based reading instruction and explored the perspectives of the teacher, the students, and the researcher about the use of literature in three different literature-based classrooms. Six teachers (third grade or above) were identified, teachers who were…

This paper synthesizes the impressions of what is known about members of the education professorate, examines the relationships between teacher educators' formative experiences and personal and professional characteristics, and attempts to answer the etiological question: who is an effective teacher educator? A body of literature on the…

When critical thinking skills are set adrift from course content, teachers soon fall prey to using critical thinking skills as techniques for getting students to succeed in class rather than surviving outside the classroom. However, the majority of writers in critical thinking skills agree that the skills are not subject-specific, are teachable,…

A study investigated non-native instructors' communication behaviors as perceived by their students. Subjects, 81 undergraduate students on 2 campuses of a state university in the northern United States, responded to a questionnaire. The results of qualitative and quantitative analyses indicated that U.S. students' feeling about non-native…