As teaching is a highly skilled and complex profession, pre-service teachers need to develop a series of attributes for their practice in relation to pedagogy, content, student learning, classroom management and their ability to engage in reflection. Through reflective narrative, this article seeks to share how a tertiary music educator prepares…

From effective learning research, there is a general consensus that hands-on experiences help students to learn. The question that this paper seeks to answer is what it is about these activities that fosters student learning. In a review of the literature, three factors have been identified as making a significant contribution to this strategy's…

Seventeen Grade Six students were divided into small groups to study the concept of forces in the context of magnets and their properties. The researcher, a pre-service primary school teacher, encouraged the students into conversation about magnets and it was found that, without hesitation, they talked about their prior experience of magnets. The…

Jewish day schools offer many experiences meant to foster the Jewish development of students. However, these experiences are at risk of being disconnected from one another, complicating a comprehensive approach to addressing issues of identity. This article uses a constructivist approach to identity development to frame the challenges posed by…

Several years ago, in the roots of the author's teaching career, she was consumed with reading research papers, creating innovative lesson plans, and grading. While today these activities still fill her time, now her days are marked more by dismantling and reassembling a wheelchair, programming an augmentative communication device, and carrying…

The concept of legitimate peripheral participation was developed by considering informal learning contexts. Its applicability to school classrooms is problematic. This is particularly so when teacher centred and decontextualised procedural practices predominate as they do in "usual school mathematics" classrooms. By considering the nature of…

The purpose of this study was to identify the profile of an ideal teacher for the Church Educational System (CES) for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. This study surveyed 159 students, teachers, and administrators in order to find the characteristics perceived to be ideal in a CES teacher. The survey included 16 characteristics of…

This article provides a framework of six elements of social justice curriculum design for elementary classrooms. The elements move from students learning self-love and knowledge about who they are and where they come from to learning respect for people different from themselves. Students explore social injustice, learn about social movements,…

This study involved the investigation of the effects of the Total Cluster Grouping Model on the achievement and identification of urban, elementary students and to learn about the classroom practices of and perceptions classroom teachers had of their students' ability levels over the course of the study. Proportionality of representation in…

In this paper we demonstrate that "lesson study" may be adapted from its primary use as a professional development strategy for use as a research strategy, especially to identify principles of good lesson design. We report on a project undertaken in two Australian secondary schools where lesson study research was used to investigate the…

Response to Intervention (RtI) is a general education initiative that takes place prior to evaluation for placement in special education. Essentially, the first two tiers of RtI require general education teachers to use research-based instruction with all students and then to evaluate the effectiveness of that instruction. Given that the use of…

In a nationwide survey of high school dropouts conducted in 2006, 69 percent said that school had not motivated or inspired them to work hard. The majority of educational reforms have focused on curriculum and pedagogy--what material is taught and how it is taught. However, psychological factors--often called motivational or non-cognitive…

This article explores the potential of play in the teaching of college composition. Drawing primarily on the theoretical framework of D. W. Winnicott, the author describes how he used ludic pedagogies to provide first-year writing students a "potential space" in which to explore a range of course elements including composing conventions,…

This four phase qualitative case study examined middle level mathematics teachers' perspective on the use of whole-class discourse as an instructional strategy to help all students learn mathematics. The primary research question that guided this study was what were middle level teachers' perceptions towards classroom discourse and how did their…

Instruction is the most important variable in special education, but it is often overlooked. Special instruction is what makes special education work, yet it is often neglected. We need to know more about how to teach both academic and behavioral skills more effectively, how behavioral and academic skills are interrelated, and how to choose those…