The standardised and instrumental view of teaching overshadows the unintentional spontaneous, unpredictable aspects of teaching captured by the notion of "pedagogical tact." Pedagogical tact is grounded in teacher-pupil relations involving trust and care. This article illustrates how pedagogical tact can be used as an analytical tool in…

The purpose of this study was to investigate how a chemistry teacher's questions influence the classroom discourse. It presents a fine-grained analysis of the rich variety of one teacher's questions and the roles they play in an upper secondary chemistry classroom. The study identifies six different functions for the teacher's questions:…

Student mathematics performance and the need for work-ready graduates to be mathematics-competent is a core issue for many universities. While both student and teacher are responsible for learning outcomes, there is a need to explicitly acknowledge the weak mathematics foundation of many university students. A systematic literature review was…

The traditional plan of teaching science content and then deciding at the end what to ask in an examination is challenged in this presentation, which starts the planning at the other end of the process. The intention is to consider the topic, decide what children should know and be able to do by the end, then structure the teaching, with…

What data should teachers use, and how should they use these data to improve their teaching? In this review, a diverse set of literature that addresses this question is categorized according to three distinct approaches: the diagnostic approach, the methods approach, and the teacher approach. Within the diagnostic approach, teachers collect data…

Writing can be a powerful tool for thinking and learning. Journaling is one form of writing that is a commonly used learning tool in many classrooms. Children use journals to record personal experiences, explore reactions and interpretations to reading and videos, or record, analyze, or enhance information about literature or other subject areas.…

Successful implementation of the Common Core State Standards (2010) will require an alignment between learning standards, effective instruction, and the new assessments designed by the Partnership for the Assessment of Readiness for College and Career (PARCC) and Smarter Balanced (SB) consortia. Both the CCSS and the new generation of assessments…

Maximizing student potential requires explicit (yet flexible) guidelines for tutors and advisors. Many tutors enhance student potential by utilizing an effective process known as the "The Tutoring Cycle," which promotes content knowledge and facilitates independent success (MacDonald, 2000). Similarly, when students attend advising sessions in…

Adapting support contingently to student needs by first diagnosing their current understanding, that is, scaffolding, is considered a key aspect of excellent teaching. The use of classroom scaffolding is rare, however. We therefore investigated the benefits to teachers of a professional development program that was based upon a model of contingent…

Although some general practitioners now "prescribe" education to patients it would be wrong to see it as a panacea. Those who claim it can cure everything from memory loss to incontinence are being unduly optimistic. Education is an important mechanism for enhancing the health and well-being of individuals and reducing the health care and…

With the advent of "Response to Intervention" there has been emphasis on preventing reading disabilities. This study examined the effectiveness of a classroom teacher Tier II intervention for struggling readers in kindergarten and first grade called the Targeted Reading Intervention. Three rural schools were randomly assigned to…

The "Try Procedures," a diagnostic teaching strategy used with precision teaching, provides a way to determine which teaching methods produce the greatest gains for individual students. Five steps feature initial assessment, dividing items to be taught, teaching by two or more methods, probing, and looking at the data. Comparison of two sight word…

Innovative methods forcapturing the attention of problem learners are described. (CK)

Describes a history of psychology course taught using R. I. Watson's prescriptive framework. Also notes advantages, disadvantages, and teaching implications. (CK)