For decades, the "expanding communities" model has dominated the elementary classroom, sustained by notions that young children need to first understand their local communities before they can understand the broader world. As proponents of this approach value how it supports young learners developmentally, critics fault its narrow scope.…

A set of questions developed as an analytical tool can energize and deepen student investigations of historical maps.

This paper examines the issues and opportunities related to the higher education systems of two developing countries, Bhutan and Nepal. After an overview of demographics and geography as well as sociopolitical histories of each nation, a closer comparison and discussion of their respective educational curricula and approaches follows. The question…

The purpose of this article is to explore the concept that embracing failure is an important pedagogy for visual arts classrooms in order to instill more creative thinking in students. The authors cover personal examples from work with graduate students in education and describe their learning through failure. The article also highlights…

This article explores two teaching approaches available to art education teachers: arranging curricula based on big ideas found in postmodern artists' work and practice, and/or adopting a choice-based studio model. The author considers the role that offering students choice (and fundamentally, shared power) plays in each of these approaches. As a…

The figure of Tadeusz Wronski is highly respected by the music establishment in Poland. One of the eminent Polish violinists of his generation, his pedagogical contributions form the cornerstone of the Polish violin school during the second half of the twentieth century. His involvement with numerous music-related causes and organizations…

Observational studies are common in educational research, where subjects self-select or are otherwise non-randomly assigned to different interventions (e.g., educational programs, grade retention, special education). Unbiased estimation of a causal effect with observational data depends crucially on the assumption of ignorability, which specifies…

Teacher evaluation systems have been a pillar of recent efforts to improve instruction and ensure that all students have access to effective educators. Chicago Public Schools (CPS) began revising its approach to teacher evaluation in 2006. An initial pilot, the Excellence in Teaching Project (EITP), launched in 2008. The current system, called…

Digital game-based instruction is a relatively new phenomenon in the world of education. Teachers hold the key to unlock the world of DGBL within the classroom. Within the classroom a teacher is much like an artist with a blank canvas and typically artistic freedom is granted. What is taught, the curriculum, is generally mandated by local,…

Mathematical problems and puzzles that require commitment and perseverance to solve can help foster deep mathematics understanding in students. In this brief, the author describes factors that influence productive struggle, shares four examples of how teachers often respond to their students' productive struggles, and offers four strategies to…

Science instruction has focused on teaching students scientific content knowledge and problem-solving skills. However, even the best content instruction does not guarantee improved learning, as students' motivation ultimately determines whether or not they will take advantage of the content. The goal of our instruction is to address the…

How might social-studies teachers enact critical forms of citizenship education in classrooms and what pedagogies support this? This question is explored in relation to literature about critical citizenship and critical literacy. Also, possibilities for practice are considered and two approaches for critical literacy in social studies are…

Our theoretical aim in this paper is to interrogate the potential for musicking--Christopher Small's (1989) conception of the musical act, which does not separate musical participation from the musical product--to open up, through a destabilizing performance of cultural hybridity, what Bhabha (2008) calls the third space of enunciation. Based on…

Following a "mixed methods" approach, this research is designed to examine whether teaching English as a foreign language (EFL) in Egypt's public schools matches the communicative English language teaching (CELT) approach. Qualitative and quantitative data were collected from 50 classroom observations, 100 questionnaire responses from…

There is a need to examine the effect of using discussion cases to enrich students' learning outcomes. A research framework was created to study this multidimensional relationship, via the instruments of interactivity, students' time devotion and students' engagement in order to find which factors could improve learning outcomes, including…