Designers-by-assignment, or subject matter experts (SMEs) who are pressed into training service, have become common in the workplace. A review of more than 24 studies on expert and novice instructional designers, however, revealed that little is known about how designers-by-assignment think about design and make design decisions in the field. A…

The Native English Teachers (NETs) Scheme has been in place for over 20 years in secondary schools in Hong Kong and yet how students perceive these teachers is under-researched. This article reports a study which analyses student perceptions of the advantage and disadvantages of learning English from NETs and their non-native counterparts, local…

This study examined the teacher education of novice teachers of English to speakers of other languages (ESOL). A survey and follow-up interviews were employed to investigate novice teachers' perceptions about four aspects of their teacher preparation: (a) degree of preparedness to teach after graduating from a teaching English to speakers of other…

Despite the high popularity of personal use of online social media, a low percentage of students and instructors use them for educational purposes. This qualitative study explores the use of social media among faculty in the discipline of public administration in the United States. Eight instructors participated in telephone interviews about their…

This paper, which draws on action research methodology, explores the use of inquiry-based learning (IBL) in the teaching of mathematics to students with social, emotional and behavioural difficulties (SEBD). The year-long study was conducted in a Form 3 secondary class that grouped 13 male students with SEBD in a Maltese secondary school. After…

The preparation of both language-building activities and a variety of teacher/student interaction patterns increase both oral language participation and content learning in a course of manual therapy with mixed-language ability students. In this article, the researchers describe their collaboration in a content-based course in English with English…

As academic interest in Chinese complementary schools has grown, insufficient attention has been paid to the role and experiences of teachers working in these schools. This paper has drawn from accounts of Chinese complementary schoolteachers in London, together with the author's personal experiences of working as a teacher in one such school. The…

In this article, we describe a programme of qualitative research and interpretive analysis around an approach to foreign language pedagogy that aimed to develop learners' symbolic competence through experience with and examination of the signs in acts of communication. Learners were presented with the problem of visually representing the abstract…

This study aims to evaluate the effectiveness of the holistic approach to Turkish grammar instruction in the first stage of primary education from the opinions and experiences of Turkish primary school teachers. This study is a qualitative research designed as a phenomenological study. The study participants were selected using maximum variation…

Increasingly diverse classrooms require educators to examine the appropriateness of teaching practices for certain student subgroup populations. With high accountability for schools to account for student achievement inclusively, a growing interest in culturally responsive practices necessitates more investigation of learning and instruction…

We use the theory of communities of practice and the concept of accountable disciplinary knowledge to describe how a learning community develops in the context of an upper-division physics laboratory course. The change in accountable disciplinary knowledge motivates students' enculturation into a community of practice. The enculturation process is…

Recent thinking in multicultural education can contribute to environmental education (EE) in culturally diverse societies. This article uses case studies of two minorities in Israel to illustrate the potential for bringing together these two areas of educational research that have developed significantly in recent years. After introducing the…

The present study evaluates the impact of the fine-tuning medium of instruction (MOI) policy in Hong Kong in the early stages of its implementation. It explores the key stakeholders' perspectives on a school-based policy via a case study, which gathered multiple sources of qualitative data (i.e. focus groups/interviews, open-ended questionnaires,…

Information and communications technology (ICT) has become an acknowledged and integral part of everyday life for many people. As research shows, the use of ICT in appropriate contexts in education can add value to teaching and learning by enhancing the effectiveness of learning itself and being a significant motivational factor in the students'…

In the United States, there is a need for pedagogical tools that help teachers develop essential pedagogical content knowledge and practices to meet the mathematical education needs of a growing culturally and linguistically diverse student population. In this article, we introduce an innovative lesson analysis tool that focuses on integrating…