This article describes an action-learning project that helped teachers to rethink their approaches to children who challenge. The project enabled and encouraged teachers to reflect critically on why and how particular children challenged them and then to use their critical reflections to strengthen their capacity to work with those children. The…

Health risk appraisals (HRAs) may be useful in the classroom. Potential benefits include: increasing awareness of potential risk, decreasing feelings of overestimated risks, providing feedback, obtaining group data, and increasing motivation to make positive behavior changes. The HRA process involves three components: administering questionnaires…

The pros in question are the students--professionals in the art of maneuvering the teacher. In entertaining style, the author conveys the importance of student-centered learning activities. Planning for active student participation counters the various student inactivity strategies; avoiding lectures and developing the art of asking questions…

The purpose of this presentation is to describe the Classroom Process Scale (CPS) and its usefulness for the assessment of teaching effectiveness. The CPS attempts to ameliorate weaknesses in existing classroom process measures by including a coding of student involvement in learning, objectives being pursued, and methods used to pursue attainment…

Presently a contradiction exists between form and function in teacher education. Although creativity and self-awareness are voiced as goals for teachers and their students, teachers are all too often educated by means of lectures, a form which holds quiet attentiveness rather than intellectual aggression a chief value. In their own classes,…

Within the last several years, between 400 and 500 faculty development programs have been instituted in colleges and universities. However, there is no clear agreement on what faculty development programs should be doing. This paper examines the major approaches to faculty development that institutions can use and the role of institutional…

Much of the important thinking that teachers do occurs during the act of teaching as well as in planning and evaluating. What teachers think about while they are teaching was the basic question addressed in this study. A model was drawn to describe the researchers' concepts of the way a teacher thinks while teaching: the teacher begins with a…

Videotapes were used to determine disruptive versus relevant student behavior exhibited (1) with teachers trained under the Oral Language Program (OLP) implemented by the Southwest Cooperative Educational Laboratory and (2) with non-OLP teachers. Five categories of disruptive behaviors--gross motor, noise making, verbalization, orienting, and…

This study identifies effective teacher strategies associated with student engagement in natural classrooms. "Student engagement" is defined as observable interest and/or attention to a learning task prescribed by the teacher. Twenty-four teachers and their students in the third and fourth grades in nine elementary schools in low-income areas in…

Teachers can learn to describe unacceptable student behavior, without judging it, and to define classroom conflicts as problems to be solved, not battles to be won. Two studies demonstrate that this type of democratic classroom environment decreases misbehavior and absenteeism. (SJL)

Research based upon the concept that teaching consists of separate, enumerable acts has proven the opposite: that it is composed of interrelated activities and influences. (MJB)

Discusses educational research related to time students spend listening and implications research findings should have on teachers' methods and roles. Development of teacher training programs to improve listening behaviors, how listening should be developed across the curriculum, and how teachers serve as listening role models are suggested. (MBR)

The two major goals of this study were (1) to estimate the magnitude of the effects of teaching performance and (2) to determine if some teaching performances were more associated with greater pupil learning than others. (MM)

Parents are their children's first and most influential teachers. That's an important job--and this popular, highly respected guidebook makes it much easier. Already a trusted resource for thousands of families, this lively book gives parents of children from age 3 through young adulthood proven strategies for teaching children the life skills…

Article concluded that furthering the development of behavior modification practices for ameliorating the academic behaviors of children in conjunction with furthering the development of ways for teaching parents to implement these practices are important activities. (Author/RK)