This investigation delineates a multi-year action research agenda designed to develop an instructional model for teaching the nature of science (NOS) to preservice science teachers. Our past research strongly supports the use of explicit reflective instructional methods, which includes Thomas Kuhn's notion of learning by ostention and treating…

The metaphorical basis of teacher reflection about teaching and learning has been a rich area of theory and research. This is a study of metaphor as a shared system of interpretation and classification, which teachers and student teachers and their supervising teachers can cooperatively explore. This study employs metaphor as a means of research…

This document is a Problem Based Learning project addressing the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 and the achievement gap issue that lingers in public education. It centers on the ideas of cultural sensitivity as a means of educating all students in an era of accountability. The goal of the project was to address the problem of minority student…

This article presents the contents of a mini-course designed by a teacher to make a review of grammar interesting and stimulating for students. The 75 questions listed for use in the review cover numerous grammatical rules in a lighthearted, humorous, and informative way. (EB)

For the full implementation of the quality of education, education reform is sweeping the earth of the motherland, realizing the reform from materials to the ways of teaching, from the contents to the form, from the form to the essence. However, how can the reform of basic education exist without the reform of normal education? We must face the…

This case study was conducted to analyze what happened when administrators in Wedgewood School District mandated special and regular education teachers on the elementary level to begin a special education inclusion model. Teachers were not permitted to adopt their own models of inclusion and were given the five Lipsky and Gartner (1995)…

Teachers know what a daunting job it can be to ensure that all students in a class learn effectively. In addition to the usual difficulties of gaining everyone's attention at once, instructors also run into the issue of preferred learning styles. In any classroom environment, the same topic is taught to multiple students, and each student may…

Contextual support for performance and understanding plays an important role in learning and teaching. This study investigated the temporal course of the effects of support--how it affects complexity and correctness of judgments about density in kindergarten (n = 35) and second-grade (n = 29) children. In the experimental group, a teacher provided…

Church documents, theology, leadership theory, and sociology come together in this article to present a pedagogy for Catholic schools that is deeply rooted in a personal faith and a contemporary understanding of the person. In order to construct a conceptual model of a pedagogy grounded in Christian spirituality, the meaning of the term "pedagogy"…

In the fall of 2007, the Buck Institute for Education (BIE) conducted a national survey of high school reform and project based learning (PBL). The study included teachers from several major high school reform networks that emphasize PBL as an instructional approach: New Tech High, High Tech High, Edvision Schools, and Envision Schools. It also…

This paper presents (i) a purpose-built conceptual model for professional learning and (ii) a leadership framework designed to support a large-scale project involving diverse sites across the state of Queensland, Australia. The project had as its focus teacher-capacity building and ways to improve literacy and numeracy outcomes for students at…

This paper identifies the ways in which the Productive Pedagogies framework has been refined as a research tool for evaluating classroom practice within a current study into issues of school reform in Queensland. Initially emerging from the landmark Queensland School Reform Longitudinal Study (1998-2001), the Productive Pedagogies has been taken…

This paper describes strategies used by the authors to assist preservice social studies teachers with understanding and applying models and practices for effectively integrating technology into their future classrooms--thus, strengthening the link between technology and pedagogy (or technological pedagogical content knowledge). Efforts with…

Today there are little more of 3 million chemist all over the world producing about 800,000 papers a year. They produce new substances--from some hundreds in 1800 to about 20 million now--the vast majority artificial. This rate is growing quite fast. Once the majority of chemistry teachers all over the world used textbooks as the main (sometimes…

Long before the first day of class, students have preconceived notions about what a communication research methods class will consist of: mathematics, incomprehensible topics, boring content, and overall agony. These notions automatically make a research methods instructors' job quite difficult (Denham, 1997). Not only do they have to explain…