During the last ten years, the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 (NCLB) has ensured that educators at every level focus on accountability, use scientifically-based research, be data driven, and use standardized tests in an effort to improve student learning. Love it or hate it, NCLB has been the catalyst for huge changes in the world of education…

Exploring the Solar System in the elementary school curriculum has traditionally involved activities, such as building scale models, to help students visualize the vastness of space and the relative size of the planets and their orbits. Today, numerous websites provide a wealth of information about the sun and the planets, combining text, photos,…

To better understand the development of children's thinking in three-dimensional geometry, we conducted a teaching experiment with 8- and 9-year olds in which children built and described polyhedra during several lessons. Analysis of pre-/post-assessments showed that children advanced in their geometric reasoning and began to identify, enumerate,…

One way of understanding the impact of the (re)emergence of a performance approach to teaching Shakespeare's plays that was, in part, initiated by the "Shakespeare Set Free" program and the books its creators composed is to say that for many teachers their work initiated the process of making performance activities central in English classrooms.…

The authors present a simple classroom experiment that can be used as a teaching device to introduce important concepts of organizational economics and incentive contracting. First, students take the role of a principal and design a contract that consists of a fixed payment and an incentive component. Second, students take the role of agents and…

Just as athletes stretch their muscles before every game and musicians play scales to keep their technique in tune, mathematical thinkers and problem solvers can benefit from daily warm-up exercises. Jessica Shumway has developed a series of routines designed to help young students internalize and deepen their facility with numbers. The daily use…

By understanding how the brain works, educators are better equipped to help students with everything from focusing attention to increasing retention. That's the promise of brain-based learning, which draws insights from neurology, psychology, technology, and other fields. Bringing this information to the classroom can help teachers engage diverse…

Customers determine whether a product fulfills their needs or satisfies them. "Quality control", then, is the process of finding out what the customer wants, along with designing, producing, delivering, and servicing the product--and ultimately satisfying the customer's expectations. For many years, people considered a product to be of good…

Reading and writing are being transformed by global changes in communication practices using new media technologies. This article introduces iPed, a research-based pedagogy that enables teachers to navigate innovative digital text production in the literacy classroom. The pedagogy was generated in the context of a longitudinal digital literacy…

Playful structure is a new pedagogic image representing a more balanced and integrated perspective on early years pedagogy, aiming to blend apparent dichotomies and contradictions and to sustain and evolve play-based practice beyond Year 1. Playful structure invites teachers and children to initiate and maintain a degree of playfulness in the…

Treating employees fairly produces many positive outcomes, but evidence suggests that managers' efforts to be fair are often unsuccessful because they emphasize the wrong aspects of justice. Managers tend to emphasize distributive justice, though employees may be most concerned with procedural and interactional justice. Organizational justice…

This article reports on a 4-week class project in which students created Web 2.0 digital stories and shared and discussed them with their peers using VoiceThread, a digital media online tool. Participants were English language learners in an academic writing class at a major research university in the United States. Digital stories provided an…

The use of computer-supported collaborative learning is more and more commonplace in language learning classrooms; this has given rise to the need for more research on roles and processes of telecollaboration in language teaching and learning and how online interactions are integrated with face-to-face classroom activities. Using a data-driven,…

The purpose of this classroom-based study was to discover the kinds of skill integration tasks that were employed by English teachers in Kuwait and to measure their attitudes toward implementing the skill integration technique in their classrooms. Data collection involved recording 25 hours of classroom-based observations, conducting interviews…

In her new book, Valerie Kinloch, award-winning author of "Harlem on Our Minds", sheds light on the ways urban youth engage in "meaning-making" experiences as a way to assert critical, creative, and highly sophisticated perspectives on teaching, learning, and survival. Kinloch rejects deficit models that have traditionally…