Critical thinking--evaluating and analyzing data to make informed judgments--is essential in both the classroom and everyday life. Teaching critical thinking skills in the elementary grades is often an afterthought--if it's a thought at all. Veteran primary teacher and instructional leader Erin Shadowens proposes that students of all ages benefit…

Educators are faced with standardized testing weighing heavily as the basis of the curriculum. Several education policies have been put in place to support accountability in education but have created a decline in social studies instruction (Gaudelli & Laverty, 2018). This transcendental phenomenological qualitative study sought to bring…

Activating joy is a rigorous and serious pursuit in literacy education. In this article, we guide educators through the framework of culturally and historically responsive education and its five pursuits: identity, skills, intellect, criticality, and joy. Our focus is on the fifth pursuit -joy-- and we support elementary school teachers in…

Schools have been using various approaches to address the pandemic-related struggles that students are experiencing with mathematics. There is an overwhelming consensus among both educators and researchers that we need to adopt acceleration rather than remediation as a tool to counteract the challenges that students currently face. Acceleration is…

This book introduces the main concepts of pragmatics as they relate to the young English language learner classroom and research with young second language learners (YLLs). It considers the speech acts which are particularly relevant to YLLs and presents research findings on learners' development of speech act perception and production. It…

This book provides teachers with 50 dynamic activities to teach science, through music, food, games, literature, community, environment, and everyday objects. The authors share tried and tested ideas from their collective 75 years of teaching experiences. For the busy teacher with little time to plan lessons, resources are provided that include…

Policymakers' neoliberal reforms have negatively altered early childhood teaching and teacher education. In doing so, these policies make it difficult for preservice teachers to learn how to engage in pedagogical practices that sustain their students' sociocultural worlds. To address this issue, we utilized case study methodology to examine how a…

Acknowledging that our professional development (or methods course) was not going as well as we had hoped was difficult. However, knowing what to do and correcting the problem was even more challenging. This article explains how we engaged teachers in helping us rethink our video club by listening to and acting on their ideas. Through "coffee…

Three years after the COVID-19 pandemic, school systems worldwide are still on the road to recovery. As students return to in-person learning, there is an increased awareness among educators to investigate the areas of student need where interventional strategies could be applied to bridge the learning loss and help further student academic…

The New York State Education Department (NYSED) has a partnership with NWEA for the development of the 2024 Grades 3-8 English Language Arts Tests. Teachers from across the State work with NYSED in a variety of activities to ensure the validity and reliability of the New York State Testing Program (NYSTP). The 2024 Grades 3 and 4 English Language…

This manuscript describes the need elementary teachers have to analyze beginning and complex texts for teaching affordances and obstacles when teaching reading foundational skills and core ELA standards. A Guide to Analyze Texts for Elementary Students (GATES) is provided and described. Two teacher cases discuss how real teachers have used the…

This study examined how elementary preservice teachers attend to precision and how exposure to engaging tasks and activities impacted the development of this Standard for Mathematical Practice. Additionally, the study aimed to understand how the experiences of this study impacted participants' perspectives toward implementing SMP 6: Attend to…

The aim of this article is to present a case study in the field of ESD for in-service teachers training conducted in a Swiss primary school. A Discursive Community of Interdisciplinary Practices (DCIP) has been created including researchers, teachers, and a pedagogical advisor in the context of ESD, focusing on the topic of chocolate. In this…

Teachers' self-efficacy influences their ability to teach students. Primary grade teachers (K-3) are tasked with teaching all content areas. K-3 teachers struggle with self-efficacy to teach science content rigorously and find the time to teach science through hands-on learning. This study addressed the gap in research for teaching science through…

Many job postings in postsecondary and PK--12 dance education will ask applicants for a statement of teaching philosophy. This is most commonly a one- to two-page written statement that summarizes your beliefs about teaching and learning that underpin the way you go about structuring learning activities, curriculum, student engagement, and…