My fulfillment in life comes through helping others develop their potential, work through their troubles, and follow their dreams. I have found that my college students embrace this aspect as I teach them expressive, author-involved writing. Peter Elbow's work asserts that this type of writing fits into his theory of personal development, which is…

An 18-week experimental intervention tested the effect of the WAC strategy known as microthemes on math achievement of secondary students. The sample population included 231 students, with 106 in the experimental group and 125 in the control group, enrolled in six different math courses from basic to advanced, ninth to twelfth grade. Students in…

Teacher leadership takes different forms and serves various important functions in bringing about and sustaining educational change. However, prior research suggests such leadership is difficult to cultivate. Most efforts to develop teachers' leadership abilities take place when teachers are already in the classroom. Teacher education…

The number of ethnic Chinese students in schools across Australian cities is small but increasing. It is important to understand how these students socialise into the Australian (mathematics) education system, so that we can better facilitate their education experiences in ways which optimise their potential to learn. This paper reports on part of…

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has created tools and supports intended to help teachers adapt to the Common Core State Standards in English language arts and mathematics. The tools seek to find the right balance between encouraging teachers' creativity and giving them enough guidance to ensure quality. They are the product of two years of…

Communication has always been at least partly a visual experience--insofar as the speaker's appearance on a stage or the text's appearance on the page. Certainly, however, the experience is becoming more and more visual. Thus, equipping students with the tools necessary to analyze and evaluate the visual rhetoric that surrounds everyone is a task…

Because of the rapidly changing nature of chemical instrumentation, students must be trained in how to learn and understand new instruments. Toward this end, students are asked to create small instrument manuals, or instrument profiles, for the major pieces of equipment studied during an instrumental analysis course. This writing-intensive process…

This article describes a project in poetry and visual art that leads students to explore metaphor in generative and novel ways. The author shares what she and her teaching partner Ronna Pritikin have learned about fostering brave and joyful student artist and poets. "Be an Artist With Your Words" is a twelve-session residency, in which the author…

This exercise is designed to illustrate how challenging it is to listen. Although listening is an activity that people use more than speaking, reading, or writing, it is typically not afforded the same level of instruction and focus (Adler & Rodman, 2011). In addition, humans are subject to such continual and diverse stimuli; most do not even…

Writing activities are a sure way to assess and enhance students' science literacy. Sometimes the author's students use technical writing to communicate their lab experiences, just as practicing scientists do. Other times, they use creative writing to make connections to the topics they're learning. This article describes both types of writing…

To celebrate a milestone in eighth-graders' lives--leaving middle school and moving on to high school--the author assigns them the "Coming of Age" project, which examines the big idea of identity and promotes the move from self-reflection to self-expression. The project also includes writing components that correspond to each of the nine…

Educators continually seek innovative methods by which to engage students. Kolb's experiential learning theory was a catalyst for designing and incorporating a pop-up retail consignment store into a junior level retail promotion course. After five years of use and refinement, the project has proven to be a powerful method to engage students in the…

Reflective writing is a student-centered approach widely used in science and engineering courses that helps students develop a holistic scientific mindset. We present a multiple case study in two science courses in which students engaged in reflective writing. The goal of this study was to explore relationships between students' performance found…

This pilot study aims at integrating a socio-pragmatic concept, Cooperative Principles, into an experimental writing project on the genres of comparison and contrast. It reports on a six-week study of five undergraduates voluntarily recruited in a university located in central Taiwan. In surveying their writing momentum before and after the…

This paper describes how a gamified rewards and penalties framework was used to increase attendance and engagement in a level six undergraduate computing module teaching game production. The framework was applied to the same module over two consecutive years: a control year and a trial year. In both years the tutor, assignments and assessment…