This paper argues for the foregrounding of improvisation and education "in the moment" within youth workers' professional development. Devised in collaboration with third-year Youth and Community Work students and lecturers at a university in Birmingham, this participatory action research project drew on work of jazz ethnomusicologists…

The credential landscape of vocational and higher education in the UK has expanded in recent years, alongside a rise in the number of students undertaking qualifications and a steady increase in tuition fees. The transition from an apprenticeship to higher education is one example of the progression from vocational to higher education. However,…

Argumentation is one of the central practices in science learning and helps deepen students' conceptual understanding. Students should learn how to communicate ideas including procedure tests, data interpretations, and investigation outcomes in verbal and written forms through argument structure. This article presents a negotiation model to…

This article describes experiences with a qualitative research project into teachers' learning from innovating their own educational practices. Decades of New Public Management (NPM) in the Netherlands, with its top-down and businesslike approach to areas of public interest, obscured the learning and innovating capacity of teachers, teams, and…

Universal Instructional Design (UID), an approach to curriculum and pedagogy that promotes multiple means of access and expression in the classroom, allows instructors to better prepare diverse learners with twenty-first-century skill sets through nontraditional assignments. However, these nontraditional approaches can be difficult to assess.…

The pink triangle exercise is an example of an experiential learning exercise that creates cognitive dissonance and deep learning of unrealized internalized biases among social work students. Students wear a button with a pink triangle on it for 1 day and write a reflection paper. The exercise increases self-awareness, cultural competence, and the…

The purpose of this research is to develop a reliable and valid instrument in order to determine the elementary school students' levels about reflective thinking. A total of 320 students of 6th, 7th and 8th grades from 6 different primary schools participated in the study. It was identified that the instrument was composed of totally 17 items with…

Teachers' conceptions of teaching, including assessment practices, are substantial in directing student learning. Our article refers to assessment at tertiary level biological education. We studied life science (more specifically microbiology-related) teachers' assessment discourse describing how they understood assessment as part of their…

Service-learning provides community service as well as authentic, curriculum-driven learning experiences (Furco & Root, 2010) and has been an effective component of teacher education courses (García, Arias, Murri, & Surna, 2010; Mitton-Kukner, Nelson, & Descrochers, 2010; Spencer, Cox-Petersen, & Crawford, 2005). With these…

Feedback is widely acknowledged as the crux of a learning process. Multiplicities of research studies have been advanced to address the common "cri de coeur" of teachers and students for a constructive and effective feedback mechanism in the current higher educational settings. Nevertheless, existing pedagogical approaches in feedback…

This article reports on a semester-long project where a TESOL professor and English Education professor modeled collaborative teaching and explicitly taught collaboration skills to a coscheduled teaching methods class consisting of TESOL and Secondary English teacher candidates. Data were collected in the form of pre- and postsemester surveys. In…

This study explored patterns in L2 writing development by focusing on one of the linguistic features of texts (fluency) from a complex dynamic systems perspective. It investigated whether two English-as-a-foreign-language university students would experience discontinuous change (phase transition) in their writing fluency through repetition of a…

This paper aimed to explore how preschool teachers' experience their strengthened teaching mission, specifically when working with scientific exploration. The study was based on the philosophy of the life-world, a branch of the phenomenological movement. Life-world philosophy focuses on the concrete reality humans inhabit and is responsive to its…

Recent studies suggest that the quality of reflective practice being achieved in educational settings is inadequate. Our study aims to determine the level of reflection present in written student reflections in a nonprofessional undergraduate course. We also seek to explore student and instructor perspectives on the value of reflective practices.…

It is the aim of this investigation through literature review to identify teacher characteristics that may best promote social capital in students, thereby improving their ability to succeed in society. This review defines success as the procurement of a career-aimed occupation or a prestigious occupation. Consequently, it intends to (a) provide a…