The first days of any teacher's career leave indelible memories of trials and errors, successes and failures, and efforts to get to know one's students. No matter how many years one teaches, those first students in those first classes stand apart in a teacher's mind. In this article, the author shares his insights and realizations regarding his…

The research on students-as-responders in high school writing classes alters the teachers' responsibility to define for students and themselves just what they mean by response and urges them to look closely at what they have to do to prepare students to become good responders. The responses made by high school students during peer reviewing are…

In many elementary calculus textbooks in use today, the definition of a "smooth curve" is slightly ambiguous from the students' perspective. Even when smoothness is defined carefully, there is a shortage of relevant exercises that would serve to elaborate on related subtle points which many students may find confusing. In this article, the authors…

Counselor educators and supervisors can enhance the group supervision process by intentionally selecting expressive arts activities designed to help supervisees develop personal awareness. Expressive arts activities also can serve to increase group understanding and cohesion. The authors provide a rationale for using expressive arts in…

The purpose of this study was to examine individual differences in attitudes toward Audience Response Systems (ARSs) in secondary school classrooms. Specifically, the impact of gender, grade, subject area, computer comfort level, participation level, and type of use were examined in 659 students. Males had significantly more positive attitudes…

Drawing on data associated with an investigation of classroom read alouds and discussions of children's literature, this article conceptualizes the reading aloud and discussions of picturebooks as an "interpretive space" for elementary grade students' exploration of visual images and written text. Analyzing the types of responses…

This article is a compilation of the views of 16 PhD students and the author on Steven Klees' 2007 article titled, "A quarter century of neoliberal thinking in education: Misleading analyses and failed policies." The students and the author have taken Klees' article as a stimulus to try and explicate the anatomy of the decline of the…

The growth of surveillance in UK schools in recent years has resulted in the development of what can be labelled as the surveillance curriculum. Operating through the overt and hidden curricula, contemporary surveillance practices and technologies not only engage students in a discourse of control, but also increasingly socialise them into a…

The use of the "Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders" (DSM IV) as a teaching tool for social workers to understand mental illness has been debated for many years. The general consensus is that social workers need to be "familiar" with this classification system. Social Work's person in environment perspective, however, requires…

There is evidence that spontaneous learning leads to relational understanding and high positive affect. To study spontaneous abstracting, a model was constructed by combining the RBC model of abstraction with Krutetskii's mental activities. Using video-stimulated interviews, the model was then used to analyze the behavior of two Year 8 students…

Racial and language minority students who must repeat high school exit exams are at increased risk of dropping out of school. Each time students fail an exit exam, they become less confident that they will ever pass and more unsure about their ability to graduate and their postsecondary plans. The relationship between students' culture and their…

Each year, when standardized test scores are published for California students, the same message tends to surface: In general, the scores of blacks and Latinos trail those of other groups, especially whites. This pattern emerges so often that it usually doesn't surprise educators or researchers. In the author's search to better understand the…

Competence-based stereotypes can negatively affect women's performance in math and science (referred to as stereotype threat), presumably leading to lower motivation. The authors examined the effects of stereotype threat on interest, a motivational path not necessarily mediated by performance. They predicted that working on a computer science task…

In this article, the author compares how her pupils responded to the same task when working individually and in small groups. She wants to look at communication and the effect that increasing the opportunities for collaborative group work has had on the quality of her pupils' understanding. She became concerned that the 23 "Level D" children (age…

An instructor of a basic communication course began a section designed for students with high levels of communication apprehension. To the basic format of the course, the instructor added sections on the nature of communication apprehension, goal setting, relaxation, visualization, and performance activities that gradually increased in complexity…