Student-centered classrooms, where the focus is on the way students learn concepts and skills rather than the way a teacher delivers the lessons, is a popular theme in current classrooms at all levels. A clear distinction must be made between student-centered teaching as a philosophy and student-centered teaching as a specific set of instructional…

In this article, I explore the impact of receiving mentorship into research and theory of the field that was guided by a social constructivist learning lens. I reflect on the ways that my conception of research and research agenda were framed subconsciously by early experiences investigating my secondary mathematics teaching practice under the…

This article describes a collaboration between the "Rubin Center" and my "Methods of Teaching Art" class and explores how constructivist practices support democratic citizenship and idea-based art education curriculum building. The collaboration came about as a revived attempt to expand the performance-based and experiential…

This academic essay provides a strategy for teaching complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) in the classroom, a subject typically critiqued as unconventional and non-scientific. It demonstrates how students can enhance their critically reflective skills by examining polarizing and controversial medical topics, which are often considered by…

As middle grades teacher educators, we carry a responsibility to prepare pre-service teachers for the realities of practice ahead in their real-world classrooms. Similarly, middle school instructional coaches and specialists support in-service practitioners within the authentic context of their real world, real time experiences as teachers. In the…

The Community of Inquiry framework is a collaborative-constructivist process model that describes the essential elements of a successful online higher education learning experience. This history column entry briefly describes the 20 years of progress in the framework. The column is divided into two decades, first, explaining the establishment of…

As part of our ethical responsibilities as scholar-practitioners and community members living as uninvited guests on Indigenous territories, we engaged in a collaborative inquiry to explore ways in which Indigenous pedagogies and worldviews extend understandings of self within self-study research. Over several years, we engaged in reflective…

Flux pedagogy refers to the integration of relational and critical pedagogy frameworks into a transformative and responsive teaching approach. It is constructivist, student-centered, relational, adaptive, and reflexive; it's a humanizing pedagogy that can help educators to examine the goals and processes of schooling in this moment of extreme…

Bruce M. Shore's research contributions in gifted education have focused on three contexts that impact how giftedness is understood and the instructional environments that serve gifted learners' educational needs. This article describes these contributions and provides selected examples plus a more complete Supplemental Online bibliography. First,…

Problem solving plays an essential role in all scientific disciplines, and solving problems can reveal essential concepts that underlie those disciplines. Thus, problem solving serves both as a common tool and desired outcome in many science classes. Research on teaching problem solving offers principles for instruction that are guided by learning…

This paper describes an alternative approach to teaching and learning practices in an undergraduate physics laboratory. The instructor plans and implements the 5E instructional model into the laboratory instruction. The article includes an example of the 5E lesson for the laboratory component of a physics course, which has separate lecture and…

A detailed characteristic of teaching and learning approaches used within the new concept of Learning by Being (LBB) is given. The evolution of educational paradigms from Learning by Doing (LBD) and Learning by Understanding (LBU) toward LBB is analyzed. The basic idea of LBB is students' ownership on cognitive goals, or the assumption of learning…

The Community of Inquiry (CoI) framework, a research-based seminal work, provides a structure for integrating a collaborative constructivist approach in course design, implementation, and evaluation. The CoI framework suggests that by fostering three essential elements -- social presence, cognitive presence, and teaching presence -- a community of…

Studies focusing on pre-service teachers have shown that the inclusion of the learning cycle model in a methods course result in improvement in understanding of and attitude toward the learning cycle model of inquiry. However, pre-service teachers' understanding and beliefs about the learning cycle model may remain varied and inaccurate and their…

"Lesson that come easy are not lessons at all. They are gracious acts of luck. Yet lessons learned the hard way are lessons never forgotten"--Don William. The present paper illustrates how to plan effectively for teaching prose in English. The design and strategy of the lesson can be planned prior to the teaching class. Teaching prose is…