Teacher leadership is "hard." Many of the reasons are obvious: Teaching is a highly labor-intensive profession to begin with, leaving little downtime for work with other adults. School schedules are notoriously stingy with space for adult collaboration. Teachers are rarely paid to exercise leadership; when they are, they are never paid…

"The Geography Teacher" provides hands-on reference and educative material for K-12 Geography teachers. The journal also pioneers innovative ideas for contemporary teaching methods, including lesson plans. This issue contains the following: (1) Census in Schools Program (census.gov); (2) Ask Dr. de Blij (Dr. Harm de Blij); (3) Eritrea:…

Questions about the suitability of cognitively-oriented instructional approaches for students of different academic levels are frequently raised by teachers and researchers. This study examined student participation in knowledge-building discourse in two implementations of a short inquiry unit focusing on environmental problems. Participants in…

Although Web 2.0 technologies have been recognized as effective means of conducting group learning activities, a critical and challenging issue of Web 2.0-based learning is the lack of mechanisms for promoting information exchanges and sharing among participating students. To cope with this problem, an intelligent blog system is proposed in this…

This study examines online messages in a discussion forum that a group of K-12 history teachers used to discuss curriculum implementations as part of their professional development. It has 3 main research foci. First, it focuses on identifying the types of assistances provided to the teachers in an online forum. Second, it examines teachers'…

Online discussion can be designed to develop the skills and confidence of students as well as providing an opportunity for constructing knowledge. If students decide not to participate or join too late, they put their own development and the quality of the learning community at risk. This article reflects on a first term undergraduate experience…

The development of community in educational settings is now recognized as a social and collaborative process that is an integral part of learning. As classrooms and communities extend beyond the traditional four walls, research related to online community development across media is of vital importance to teachers. The study reported in this paper…

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…

The purpose of this study is to investigate teachers' learning improvement through participation in study groups. In particular, this study examined how two second grade active participant teachers' classroom practice changed over time and how their changes were related to changes in their study group meetings, which they called Professional…

Newspapers and other media are often used as a source of information on science issues, both by the public and teachers in classrooms. Over six months, we collected discussions of global warming issues from the online forums of a national newspaper. Our analysis of these contributions suggests there is a considerable effort in these forums,…

This study, conducted in 2005 in a New Zealand tertiary institution, examines Asian students' perceptions of the much-promulgated cooperative learning concepts in the form of group work and group assignments. Twenty-two Asian students participated in one-hour individual face-to-face semi-structured interviews. The study found that Asian students…

Genetically modified (GM) crops such as maize (Zea mays L.), cotton (Gossypium hirsutum L.), soybean [Glycine max (L.) Moench], and canola (Brassica rapa L.) have been widely adopted by American farmers. In spite of their use in the United States, the European Union (EU) imposed a 6-year de facto moratorium (1998-2004) on the cultivation/import of…

The development and evaluation of a parenting intervention based on Sigel's distancing theory and conceptualization of intervention processes is described. An iterative program development strategy was comprised of 3 studies: (1) Results of interviews with lower-income parents of Grades 1-4 children regarding views of children's futures and…

This paper identifies some of the pedagogical benefits of an active learning course delivery complemented by an online discussion forum to teach sustainability by evaluating the case of a geography master's course. The potential benefits and some challenges of an active learning course delivery to teach sustainability in geography and related…

Cross-age tutors were randomly assigned to one of the three tutor training conditions distinguished for the current study: (1) the labelling experimental condition, characterized by requirements to label their tutor interventions, based on the e-moderating model of Salmon; (2) the non-labelling experimental condition, focusing on tutor's acting…