Higher order thinking skills have been embedded into state teaching standards, including Standard 9 of the New Jersey Core Curriculum Content Standards (NJCCCS) for 21st Century Life and Careers. These standards aim to encourage problem solving, critical thinking, reasoning, and real-world application in order to prepare students for the workplace…

This article explores student empowerment in a restructured urban Title I middle school. The study includes data from eight participants in an action research project that involved a critical inquiry unit in an eighth-grade language arts class that asked students, "How are you empowered and disempowered by school?" Findings reveal that…

Online conversations help teachers engage in constructive criticism and attend more carefully to aligning lesson plans with problem solving. This article describes a strategy for using an online discussion board to help teachers evaluate one another's lesson plans. The online peer-review activity suggests that fostering critical pedagogical…