An important step to achieving a sustainable department culture that encourages innovation in teaching is the alleviation of the isolation that teaching faculty experience. Decreasing this isolation should be accomplished in a manner that respects all instructors' classroom practices while simultaneously exposing faculty to new ideas. In this…

Collective cultural transformation is needed to save the Earth from the growing effects of the human-caused environmental problems. Music education, too, can take part in preparing future generations with the knowledge and skills needed to address the world's complex challenges and create a more sustainable future. Approaching music education from…

Despite abundant research on effective reading instruction, many teachers struggle to meet the diverse needs of their students, particularly those with dyslexia. Even though reading is an essential skill for academic success, according to the 2019 "Nation's Report Card" published by the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP),…

Observing teaching with a practiced, professional eye can yield valuable insights into the specific learning opportunities that students are (or are not) provided. However, recent policy initiatives have emphasized using formulaic rubrics and checklists to rate teacher behaviors and evaluate their use of particular instructional moves. Rather than…

For more than 30 years, Albert A. Bartlett published "Thermal patterns in the snow" in this journal. These are patterns produced by heat sources underneath the snow. Bartlett's articles encouraged me to pay attention to patterns in snow and to understanding them. At winter's end the last snow becomes dirty and is heaped into piles. This…

Learning to write is a complex process and children have to orchestrate a range of processes and skills in order to produce written messages. Young children are facing increasing demands in terms of the expected complexity of their written messages in education settings across the world. Teachers, in turn, are challenged to support children and…

Coaches play integral roles in many schools' learning cultures, but they often find their entry into coaching life disorienting and difficult. Educators typically take on the mantle of coach because they were successful as teachers, and they may have limited experiences working with adult learners. For new coaches, having access to the support and…

Teaching students to become critical consumers of interviews, which often serve as influential sources for learning and interpreting world events, is important in today's information-rich world. This paper outlines an approach to teaching in-depth interviewing in which students examine excerpts from interviews (e.g., archival collections, oral…

As literacy researchers continue to investigate how young students make sense of texts, specifically picture books, attention has expanded beyond the role that written language plays in reading comprehension to the various ways that visual images, typography, design elements, and digital devices support and challenge young readers during the act…

Effective mentors set clear expectations for their work with the teachers they support. This is a critical step in the process of building trust between mentor and mentee, and it is never more important than when mentors conduct observations of teachers as they engage in classroom instruction. With much teaching now occurring online, mentoring is…

Helfrich addresses two perspectives from which to think about observation in the classroom: that of the teacher observing her classroom, her group, and its needs, and that of the outside observer coming into the classroom. Offering advice from her own experience, she encourages and defends both. Do not be afraid of the disruption of outside…

In this collaborative professor-student contribution, an experiential nature-based university psychology course is described and discussed. Existing scholarship on experiential environmental education informed the course, with the overall aim of educating the "whole student". Experiential environmental education has been identified as…

Once instructional coach Anne Beaton began creating chances for teachers to get into one another's classrooms to observe and learn about different teaching styles, she realized that not only is studying one another's teaching practices as a community essential in serving students, it also lifts teachers up as leaders. Beaton knew she was learning…

The purpose of this paper is to review the utility of think alouds in writing instruction and highlight the function of think-aloud modeling in the development of cognitive and metacognitive strategies that support learners' independence. For these purposes, modeling with coping is also explained. Coping models, in which teachers encounter…

In this article, we describe the purpose and the process of video-cued ethnography. Using examples primarily from the Children Crossing Borders study, we outline six basic elements of video-cued ethnography including site selection, participant-observation, filming, editing, focus group interviews, and comparative analysis. We detail some of the…