This excerpt from "A New View: Economics and the Zoo," by Diane J. Coleman and Joyce R. Monger, gives teaching suggestions for teaching economic concepts using the zoo as a case study. It gives texts of three readings for students on the purposes of zoos, evaluating a zoo's accomplishments, and economic decision making through analysis of typical…

Presents a class activity which uses laminated pictures from art calendars, museums, and other sources as a stimulus for writing. (SR)

Presents an in-class literature exercise to help students understand that there may be more than one "right" reading, more than one right answer, more than one right way of understanding literature. (SR)

Reports on a study of 200 lesson plans developed by student teachers. Found that lessons based on the Teach-Practice-Apply Model had fewer objectives and more fully developed lessons than those based on a conventional model of lesson development. Calls for additional research to examine the effects of lesson planning on student achievement. (CFR)

Outlines a first-day lesson plan for a first-year writing class in which the instructor engages students at the outset in building an electronic online community. Provides step-by-step methods and discusses specific advice for what to do and not to do within the context of achieving an online emphasis. (HB)

Teachers can help students realize that their own experiences provide good material for fascinating characters and stories, thus making narrative writing easier. One good way to help students recognize the power of daily events is to read to them from realistic children's literature. The article presents a model lesson. (SM)

Describes an algorithm for planning college-level mathematics lessons based on the identification and achievement of student learning objectives. Discusses the ways in which this algorithm can help novice instructors to include opportunities for active learning in their lessons. (Contains 50 references.) (Author/ASK)

Describes a writing assignment based on a "Star Trek: The Next Generation" episode in which an alien sacrifices his life so two cultures can come together. Provides questions for students to answer during the viewing of the episode. Suggests a writing assignment (and several variations) in which students create their own alien. (TB)

The communicative approach to language instruction emphasizes ways to increase student-talk and decrease teacher-talk. It necessitates including the production or performance stage in lesson plans to give students the opportunity to use the new language in simulated real-life situations. (Author/VWL)

One week after Secretary of State Colin Powell declared that the killings, rapes and other atrocities committed in Darfur amount to "genocide," in mid-September the United Nations' World Health Organization issued new figures saying 6,000 to 10,000 people are dying per month there in one of Africa's worst humanitarian crises. Powell had…

In recent years, a growing interest has developed in lesson study, a Japanese form of professional development that centers on teachers coming together to examine their practice by planning and trying out lessons. This article examines the lesson study work of a group of elementary mathematics teachers to speculate about the educative value of…

While Blackface minstrel performances today are considered inappropriate and many Americans find the language and images racially offensive, such performances were the "most popular entertainment" in antebellum America. Songs about idyllic plantation life in the South resonated with Americans adjusting to the new industrial cities of the North.…

Preservice and experienced teachers (N = 58, from 7 universities) wrote lesson plans for a hypothetical beginning band lesson, using one page from a band method book as source material. Lesson plans were analyzed for word count, level of detail, and for strategies that appeared most frequently. Experienced teachers used fewer words than…

The first part of this article shows that research in the history of technical communication has increased in quantity and sophistication over the last 20 years. Scholarship that describes how to teach with that information, however, has not followed, even though teaching the history of the field is a need recognized by several scholars. The…

Students often fail to remember, understand, and apply what they have learned in science classrooms. The sample lesson described in this article illustrates how teachers might move science education toward an authentic, engaging process that excites students while deepening their understanding of important concepts. The lesson is based on the…