The making of a book is an effective way to instill pride in authorship and to emphasize the importance of writing to children. This guide finds that the finished product (the book) capitalizes on the language background of each child, becomes an extension of the natural language of children, and teaches children to value their work and to take…

Language minority students filter what they hear in the classroom through their own anxieties at having to process and perform in a mainstream environment. An understanding of the principles of language development from the field of applied linguistics can help instructors work more effectively with language minority students. Several principles…

A symposium was held in Berne, Switzerland, in March 1996 to define the key competencies that secondary students should acquire to prepare for either employment or higher education. This document summarizes the symposium discussions of plenary sessions and working groups, comprised of teachers and school managers. The conference participants…

This handbook presents course information, reading materials, and application research projects for a distance education course that focuses on helping inservice teachers of all grades and subject areas develop a useful set of concepts for fostering their students' critical reading and reasoning abilities. The course described in the handbook is…

As part of a larger investigation into workshop approach teaching, this study looked at how the workshop approach affected student creativity in project development and how the use of reflective journals impacted student project work. The workshop approach causes students to engage in metacognitive thinking during work on their class projects.…

This is an introduction to some of the teaching models that have been developed and studied through modern educational research. Some models are designed to accomplish specific objectives, such as teaching students to form and attain concepts; some have generic applications that adapt to a range of learning styles and curriculum areas.…

If schools are not changed in dramatic ways very soon, public schools will lose their place as a vital component of the American education system. The first three chapters of this book describe the crisis in American education, arguing that what the schools were designed to do no longer serves the needs of American society. The presence of…

This book describes acclimatization, an approach to nature education that actively involves participants in the environment during a 1-week summer camping experience. The goal is to stimulate awareness of nature, increase appreciation of nature, and motivate further involvement with nature. An outcome of this process is that participants…

Invitations sent to students affect their self-concepts in ways that may then effect prevention and avoidance of self-destructive patterns and behaviors. This paper provides a comparison view of existing research and discusses the relationship between research findings on the "Instructional Rhythm Model" and the "invitational class…

Learning style is the foundation of successful teaching and teaching for thinking. The recent conceptualization of the brain as a complex system for processing and storing information can be meaningful to educators. Too many schools, however, rely on a rather mechanistic approach to learning. Future school administrators must be taught to…

The methods outlined in this guide offer teachers a variety of ways to stimulate interest, enhance concentration, increase understanding, and improve memory in their students. Chapter 1 discusses the LEARN (Learning Efficiently And Remembering Mnemonics) system, a set of strategies that help students use a variety of processing styles to a greater…

This paper focuses on how to incorporate learner strategy instruction as part of regular teacher training courses, both preservice and inservice. Panelists Andrew Cohen, Carol Hosenfeld, Anna Chamot, Rebecca Oxford, Joan Rubin, Rhoda Curtis, and Anita Wenden addresses questions from the audience on a variety of topics related to teacher education…

This study was conducted to introduce preservice teachers to cooperative learning through direct experience with the strategy. Participants (N=85) consisted of freshmen and sophomores enrolled in a course required for teacher certification. During the first 6 weeks, instruction occurred through traditional lecture methods and at midterm, a jigsaw…

In Los Angeles, racial demographics have changed radically in the past 30 years resulting in inevitable tensions in the school. This paper reports on a classroom simulation of ethnicity/race and class relations. Students adopted the roles of three polarized and rigid "color groupings": (1) Greens--ruling class, wealthy since birth; (2)…

Looking in depth at the curricular and instructional framework of a student-centered classroom, this book describes learning strategies in detail and illustrates with student samples that demonstrate how portfolios can assist students in reflective self-evaluation. The book chronicles the experiences of two teachers over their three years of…