Conferencing gives teachers and students opportunities to discuss student writing and provide feedback in individual settings. Practitioner guides offer suggestions on how conferences can be conducted, but little is known about what types of interactions occur. Two case studies, including a cross-case analysis, were conducted to describe key…

This qualitative participatory action research study provides two case studies to demonstrate how teachers in Grades 4 and 6 integrated digital tools into everyday, content-focused classroom instruction. The study demonstrates how teachers' technological pedagogical knowledge might combine with a participatory stance to encourage students to…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to examine how data are used in classroom placement routines. The authors explore educators' assumptions about the purposes of the classroom placement routine, detailing the ostensive (i.e. structure and template) and performative aspects of the routine itself, and the implications of data use for equity and…

The authors, working from a "new literacies studies" perspective, suggest that educators can better teach their students if they develop their own knowledge of the purposes, types, and language conventions students use in their informal out-of-school literacy practices. The purpose of this study was to identify the literacy practices…

In this qualitative case study, we examine the texture of talk in the booktalks of a fifth-grade classroom where authentic classroom discussions were common. The discourse analysis of classroom transcripts yielded 13 overlapping move categories describing the talk of the teacher, and nine the talk of the students. A comparison between authentic…

This case study research reports on elementary (grade 8) and secondary school (grade 9) teachers' participation in job-embedded, professional learning and engagement in collaborative inquiry. Teachers constructed an inquiry-oriented media literacy unit following the collaborative inquiry model. The current study sought to investigate how…

Purpose: Supporting teachers' use of data has become a large part of educational leaders' instructional leadership. Drawing on sensemaking theory, we explore how features of data and teachers' perceptions of them may matter when teachers consider student learning data. Design: The article draws on a 1-year, comparative case study of five…

In order to address concerns with the underrepresentation of spatial thinking in K-12 curricula, (National Research Council, 2006), Valentine and Kopcha (in press) designed and implemented a learning environment integrating cases as alternative perspective (Jonassen, 2011) in the context of eighth-grade mathematics. The design aimed to provide…

This yearlong qualitative multisite case study investigated ways middle and high school transition supports foster a developmentally responsive transition for students. A total of 23 participants engaged in this study, including 4 students, 4 middle school teachers, 13 high school teachers, 1 middle school principal, and 1 high school principal.…

The study set out to discover what characterizes the meaningful learning of mathematics among low-achieving students (LAS) and to highlight the challenges their characteristics pose for scaffolding, in particular for its adaptive core: contingent teaching. The setting was an extracurricular program for teaching meaningful mathematics to LAS…

Background: Although the professional learning community as a means of improving student achievement has received growing support from researchers and practitioners alike, professionals are still exploring ways to develop interaction networks regarding teaching and learning issues. Purpose: This study explores the evolving stages of a collective…

This article provides an example of a social studies lesson from Turkish educational context in order to facilitate comparison with examples of social studies lessons from other parts of the world. This lesson was recorded in a 7th grade class at a middle school in one of the metropolitan neighborhoods in Istanbul. According to the current…

Background/Context: Although teachers' core instructional beliefs are difficult to accurately measure, they provide a framework for understanding the thinking that underlies important curricular and pedagogical decisions made in the classroom. Previous research has primarily used self-report to study teacher beliefs, but self-report is better for…

This paper reports on findings from a five-teacher, exploratory case study, critically observing their implementation of a technology-intensive, augmented reality (AR) mathematics curriculum unit, along with its paper-based control. The unit itself was intended to promote multiple proportional-reasoning strategies with urban, public, middle school…

There are movements internationally towards curricula that incorporate values and citizenship education. In Australia, this movement has been illustrated with the adoption of a national curriculum in values education. This has arisen from the perceived need for citizens to hold values around the rights and responsibilities of functioning within a…