Although early childhood theorists agree on the importance of spending time in nature and the outdoors, it unfortunately appears that today's young children do not always have sufficient opportunities to experience and strengthen this connection. Lack of time spent in nature, combined with the health issues associated with large quantities of time…

Classroom observation rubrics are a widely adopted tool for measuring the quality of teaching and provide stable conceptualisations of teaching quality that facilitate empirical research. Here, we present four statistical approaches for analysing data from classroom observations: Factor analysis, Rasch modelling, latent class or profile analysis,…

While films are popular as teaching tools in social work education, to critique social inequalities, horror films have not been the conventional genre. This teaching note describes the creation and deployment of a course that uses horror films to address social justice issues as part of different critical reflection, which is linked to practice…

The conventional wisdom among educators and literacy gurus is that reading comprehension depends on the acquisition of isolatable, teachable, and generalizable skills. Consequently, many elementary and middle school English classrooms follow the "reading workshop" model, an approach to literacy instruction, with several variations that…

Over the past decade, researchers have developed several teaching observation protocols for use in higher education, such as the Teaching Dimensions Observation Protocol (TDOP), Classroom Observation Protocol for Undergraduate STEM (COPUS), Practical Observation Rubric to Assess Active Learning (PORTAAL), and Decibel Analysis for Research in…

The author takes the experience of book challenges as an opportunity for positive curricular changes by walking readers through the development of a formalized procedure for selecting new, diverse texts to add to the English Language Arts (ELA) program curriculum. The text-selection committee arrived at a six-step method: (1) Identify Desired…

Young readers depend on adults to provide access to a variety of materials representing diverse perspectives and providing information about topics of interest and importance to them. The decisions of literacy professionals to include or exclude a book from a lesson or a collection have far-reaching implications for the kinds of ideas,…

Ximena was sure she would be appointed as the Director of Student Life at Aspirante University, a Hispanic-Serving Institution. As interim director, Ximena strove to enact servingness in her everyday practice. Her efforts to create a culturally responsive, relevant, and affirming campus environment for Latinx students were unparalleled. However,…

In the richly heterogeneous United States, teachers largely decide what students learn. Even in states where state boards adopt a long list of instructional materials, districts can get waivers to substitute their own choices. And even when districts do pick materials, teachers do not necessarily teach them in toto. This article presents how…

Repertoire selection is one of the most impactful responsibilities music educators undertake, and the music an educator chooses for students to experience reveals implicit and explicit philosophical values. When ensemble instructors select repertoire, their decisions are often informed by an eclectic mixture of competing practical and aspirational…

The Tennessee Education Lottery Scholarship (TELS) program was designed to meet the unique needs of the State of Tennessee, while also incorporating the hallmark elements of existing merit-based aid programs in other states. This manuscript provides a snapshot of TELS recipients and their outcomes, including narrative discussion on the current…

This article explains an activity that can be conducted to form teams in university business classes. It allows students to actively participate in the team selection process and learn valuable human resource management skills. Students are placed in the role of hiring managers. They have to identify the skills and characteristics needed to…

This paper illuminates how three distinct but complementary concepts can be used to explain the prevalence of inbreeding in some contexts and the absence or limited frequency of inbreeding in others. The concepts of internal and external labour markets can be useful in understanding the academic labour market conditions that may support or…

Teachers often use books as part of their efforts to share critical information with students and to influence their attitudes. The authors define bibliotherapy, discuss why they believe they should teach lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ+) themes in elementary classrooms, outline procedures to identify appropriate books, and…

This piece outlines the process generally used for hiring faculty at community colleges and offers advice for individuals seeking positions at two-year institutions.