Make-believe play (MBP) provides kindergarteners with an authentic form of engagement that is particularly favourable to the development of oral and written language. As part of an action research study, an activity-oriented professional development (PD) program incorporating video was established to provide kindergarten teachers with guidance on…

Project based learning (PBL), a well-known pedagogical approach, is becoming more widely recognized for creating and sustaining student engagement and motivation in 21st-century learning while improving academic achievement. Teachers support this hands-on, collaborative approach and see it as beneficial for students of all learning modalities, but…

Teacher practice is rife with tensions. Tensions around what and how best to teach, how to manage situations with students, and how to manage situations with colleagues, administrators, and parents. These tensions are often seen as pairs of opposing internal and external forces: this assessment is better, but it takes a lot of time. These forces…

This case study involves one public school in a suburb of a major metropolitan area, focusing on one classroom of first grade students selected from a pool of volunteer classrooms. The first grade class of students, during their regular mathematics instruction, were given three tasks by their teachers designed to elicit a productive struggle…

This study explores a third-grade teacher's (Deb) developing knowledge and practice for incorporating representations into her teaching of science over the course of 2 years. Data was gathered from the same science unit (Rock Formation) over 2 years, and consisted of video of seven lessons, one of which was the same lesson taught over both years.…

In an urban elementary school serving predominantly White and Latinx students, the second-grade teachers created an assignment that asked students to share how their families migrated to the United States. The mother of a Black student met with the teacher to discuss her discomfort with the assignment given that their family descended from…

This article provides an analysis of a data set coming from a two-phase qualitative study that focused on fostering primary students' abstraction of interrelations among quadrilaterals (squares, rectangles, parallelograms, rhombuses, trapezoids). The pilot study consisted of work with eight primary students operating at van Hiele level 2 (e.g.,…

This case study examined teachers' perceptions and use of adaptive diagnostic assessment for improving teaching and learning of elementary-level mathematics. The purpose was to understand how the teaching and learning of mathematics occurred in the classroom and changes that transpired due to the implementation of diagnostic assessments. Findings…

Dialogue and reasoning are central to mathematics. Despite a substantial body of research illustrating the benefit of talk in the classroom, an educational debate remains in schools about how much time and empowerment should be given to children to talk in lessons. For many teachers, particularly post-pandemic, there is a professional concern…

This multiple case study sought to examine the individual experiences of three different teachers' experiences with learning about and using project-based learning in their elementary classrooms. The following factors influencing teachers' instructional decision making were used: teacher knowledge, teacher pedagogical beliefs, teacher…

Changing teachers' practice is difficult, especially in low- and middle-income contexts (LMIC). Recently, with attention turning to improving early mathematics in addition to reading outcomes, donors, governments, and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) are grappling with the design of mathematics interventions and supportive policies. However,…

Worldwide interest in Lesson Study (LS) and the opportunities offered for student learning through the use of a Structured Problem-Solving Approach (SPSA), as typically adopted in Japanese LS research lessons in mathematics, have left largely unanswered questions about the extent to which these can be replicated elsewhere. This paper presents a…

Facilitating productive mathematical discussions is considered a core practice of mathematics education. The complexity of this teaching practice presents the need for pedagogical tools to provide structure for preservice teachers (PST) developing their practice, yet little is known about "how" PSTs use these tools. This multiple case…

This article examines the pedagogical potential of art-based, early critical literacy as a space in which young bilingual children can explore the issues of human diversity and uniqueness. Adopting a qualitative case study approach, this study focused on 12 five-year-old children of Mexican origin at a charter school located in Texas.

The mathematics education literature indicates a consensus regarding the importance of developing algebraic thinking in elementary school mathematics. However, the approaches used to implement this concept vary around the world. This study examines how a popular standards-based elementary mathematics textbook series in China provides opportunities…