Socioconstructivism has been established as a prominent and intriguing learning theory, and consequently, pedagogical practice. This study focused on the introduction of constructivist pedagogy to secondary social studies pre-service teachers. Students' engagement with each other and the course instructor was a primary concern to mitigate student…

Using a critical inquiry curriculum is about teaching children to read the word and the world. Early childhood teachers apply this theory by helping children question events and texts they interact with in their communities. For example, teachers can help children understand why certain events happened, including whose voices may have been…

Background: Education is aimed at students reaching conceptual understanding of the subject matter, because this leads to better performance and application of knowledge. Conceptual understanding depends on coherent and error-free knowledge structures. The construction of such knowledge structures can only be accomplished through active learning…

Good preschool education requires professionals whose training is both solid and updated. This article presents the results of an evaluation of the continuing training received by teachers in the preschool educational sector in Spain, and discusses the level of implementation. The authors examine factors such as culture and motivation, and look…

Online discussions have been widely utilized as an educational activity, and much research has been conducted on the process and behaviors involved in asynchronous discussions. However, research on behavioral patterns in learners' synchronous discussions, including the process of social knowledge construction and project coordination is limited.…

In this paper we consider a collection of conversational practices that arise when a professional is faced with extended resistance to their offered advice. Our data is comprised of telephone calls to a UK child protection helpline. The practices we identify occur repeatedly across our corpus of advice resistance sequences and involve (1) the…

The timeliness of civic education for American youth is discussed. Particular attention is given to the history of calls for civic education, the state of civic education in schools today, particularly those serving youth in disadvantaged contexts, and the specific ways in which schools can better address the civic education needs of contemporary…

One key element sometimes missing from middle school science lessons is questioning designed to generate student discourse. The National Science Teachers Association recommends that the curriculum of middle school science programs includes "hands-on, minds-on" (NSTA 2003) inquiry-based science instruction, and according to Clough and Olson,…

In this paper, I describe an early learners' (Years 1-3) Indonesian classroom interaction developed around the concept of intercultural understandings of ways of talking about oneself and about and to others, in Indonesian and Australian contexts. I explore planned interactions for scaffolded discussion about the language of self and others in…

In this article, the author proposes Green English be thought of as a nondisciplinary approach located in the edge between disciplines, one that offers teachers and students opportunities for personal, social, political, and conceptual learning. For, just as diversity increases survival in nature, getting students to "read, interpret, and…

This article details a multi-modal active learning experience to help students understand elements of social categorization. Each student in a group dynamics course observed two groups in conflict and identified examples of in-group bias, double-standard thinking, out-group homogeneity bias, law of small numbers, group attribution error, ultimate…

This study is concerned with the challenge of understanding what factors may influence students' higher level knowledge construction. We defined higher level knowledge construction occurrences as the sum of the number of phases II to V measured using Gunawardena et al.'s (J Educ Comput Res 17(4):397-431, "1997") interaction analysis model. This…

Online videos are used increasingly in higher education teaching as part of the explosion of Web 2.0 tools that are now available. YouTube is one popular example of a video-sharing resource that both faculty and students can use effectively, both inside and outside of the classroom, to engage students in their learning, energize classroom…

The creative music strategy is a dynamic and flexible seven-step model for guiding general music students through the music concepts of improvisation and composition, followed by critical reflection. These are musical behaviors that cultivate the development of our students' deeper conceptual understandings and music independence by helping them…

This article presents an action research study into how trainee music teachers in England use a structured discussion process called "Collegial Consultation" to learn about teaching. The research shows that, in Collegial Consultation, trainees learn from each other by offering several solutions to a problem, offering reasons for their…