Teachers need to develop the ability to adapt curriculum materials. Two elementary teachers, Maggie and Catie, were asked to write narratives about their use of and changes to particular reform-oriented science lesson plans. Maggie drew on her knowledge of and experiences with students, as well as other knowledge, experiences, and resources, to…

Story hour began with an invitation to faculty to listen to stories from colleagues about their teaching experiences. Three teachers volunteered to prepare stories that would soothe and entertain, stories that would serve as an antidote for the many stresses teachers were undergoing. In less than a year, this simple idea progressed from stories…

Schools and communities may have a key role in reversing the cycle of inequality that the Roma suffer in Europe. Aiming at reducing existing inequalities, dialogic learning aims to ensure high levels of academic learning for all children, by involving the whole community through egalitarian dialogue. Less well known are the implications of this…

There has been an upsurge of interest in teaching second/foreign language (L2) pragmatics in recent years, but much of this effort has been targeted at adult learners. This article introduces small-scale informal instruction exploring the pragmatic development of 9-year-olds in Tokyo, facilitated through dialogic intervention on pragmatics using…

To understand what they read or hear, children and adults must create a coherent mental representation of presented information. Recent research suggests that the ability to do so starts to develop early--well before reading age--and that early individual differences are predictive of later reading-comprehension performance. In this paper, we…

One sign of a good task is that it will work just as well with Year 7 as with Year 13. The author asks learners to use graph-drawing software to draw a picture with graphs. He uses his imagination to suggest what a particular curve might resemble and helps learners to adjust their drawings to achieve what they are trying to make. Sometimes, one…

Stories, steeped in science content and full of specific information, can be brought into schools and homes through the power of live video streaming. Video streaming refers to the process of viewing video over the internet. These videos may be live (webcam feeds) or recorded. These stories are engaging and inspiring. They offer opportunities to…

The purpose of this qualitative study was to analyze and interpret the stories told by one teacher, Ms. M, in a fifth grade science classroom. In this study, stories are defined as teacher utterances that are used in first person or third person narrative view, and are related to an experience that occurred outside the classroom. This research…

For nearly three decades, during which the author taught everything from basic algebra to advanced placement calculus, the author thought of himself as a secondary school mathematics teacher. The notion of teaching elementary school math never appealed to him because of its simplicity. The author stresses that anyone could teach children to count,…

This article examines the "master" and "little" cultural narratives students perform in literacy narratives. Results show that students incorporate the literacy-equals-success master narrative most often, yet they also include in little narratives figures such as the hero, victim, and child prodigy. I consider how these findings can improve…

Within the context of a monocultural and monolingual education system, this paper seeks to explore and compare the experiences of Cypriot and non-Cypriot pupils in Greek-Cypriot primary schools with culturally diverse pupil populations. The concept of multiculturalism has been introduced only very recently in Cyprus and there has been little…

A challenge that professional development coordinators and instructional leaders face is designing and implementing professional development that is the most effective for improving teaching and learning in their school. To determine what is the perceptions and beliefs of elementary teachers' value of and responses to their professional…

The effects of Self-Regulated Strategy Development (SRSD) and generalization instruction with 3 second and third grade students with severe emotional/behavioral disorders, in one self-contained classroom were examined. The effects of the intervention on multiple measures of story writing were examined at baseline, postinstruction and maintenance.…

Ideological assumptions about childhood play into the production and selection of children's literature. Various ideologies proclaim that children should be happy and free from stories of evil, children's literature should help children encounter the joys in life, it should be filled with bright colors to keep children's attention, and it should…

This paper draws from a larger study conducted in Kenya, which was a narrative inquiry into a teacher's experiences of teaching the HIV/AIDS curriculum using a child-to-child approach. The two major research questions of this study were: 1) What are the experiences of a teacher teaching the HIV/AIDS curriculum using a child-to-child curriculum…