Supporting teachers for their professional development is important. Literature circle technique has a potential to create and support professional learning communities. The purpose of this research was to examine how the literature circle can be used between teachers in order to enhance their professional development. In this qualitative study…

The lobby of the college building echoes with the noise of teenagers milling around a table filled with books. Hands flutter over the bright covers, picking them up, flipping them over, thumbing through pages. Welcome to an Elon Academy Saturday at break time, the mid-point pause in this monthly gathering of the more than 70 student participants…

The five stage cycle model is an interactive flash platform that proposes a challenging scenario with associated questions about light wave features and correlations. As the students navigate from stage to stage, they are able to access some related resources and engage in small group discussions. The students are able to revisit their responses…

In a six-week literature circle unit in a tenth-grade classroom, one group of students discussed Dorothy Allison's novel "Bastard out of Carolina." By criteria frequently used to judge the quality of discussion, this literature circle was successful. However, several key moments are highlighted that point to the limits of literature circles as…

The purpose of this study is to investigate how cooperative learning approach supports teachers to design an effective teaching for promoting the students learning to construct knowledge in practice. Quantitative and qualitative research methods such as surveys and case studies were employed for data collection. A High School which challenges face…

State tests, which assess reading comprehension, ask students to make inferences and connections beyond the text. The problem of practice in which this study is situated is that students are having difficulty making meaningful connections and developing inferences in relation to the material that is read aloud together in class or assigned for…

Massive open online course "for educators" (MOOC-Ed) provide opportunities for using research-based learning and teaching practices, along with new technological tools and facilitation approaches for delivering quality online professional development. The "Teaching Statistics Through Data Investigations" MOOC-Ed course was…

The aim of the current research is to characterize the conceptual flow processes occurring in whole-class dialogic discussions with a high level of interanimation; in the present case, of a high-school class learning about image creation on plane mirrors. Using detailed chains of interaction and conceptual flow discourse maps--both developed for…

Sexual minority (e.g. lesbian, gay, bisexual, questioning; LGBQ) and gender minority (e.g. transgender) youth experience myriad health risks. Gay-Straight Alliances (GSAs) are school-based settings where they may have opportunities to discuss substance use, mental health, and sexual health issues in ways that are safe and tailored to their…

AP Literature students participated in a series of real-time online discussions to complement the in-class conversations they were having about "The Autobiography of Malcolm X." Thus, the front channel was comprised of the students who were discussing the class text aloud, and the backchannel was the online conversation the rest of the…

For the forty-third time, the Association for Educational Communications and Technology (AECT) is sponsoring the publication of these Proceedings. Papers published in this volume were presented online during the annual AECT Convention. Volume 1 contains 37 papers dealing primarily with research and development topics. Papers dealing with the…

Political division in the United States is the subject of much analysis in the fields of political science and psychology. While political partisanship looms large over discussions of the national political climate's influence on schools and classrooms, very little work exists that directly examines the effects of high school students' political…

Teachers want and need students to excel in the classroom. Cooperative learning is one method recognized to address this. Numerous researchers have shown that cooperative learning leads to improved skills in teamwork and communication in other fields (Johnson and Johnson, 2007; Slavin, 1995). Cooperative learning used in this study showed that the…

This paper provides observations of physical fitness testing in Texas schools and physical education teachers' insights about large-scale testing using the FITNESSGRAM[R] assessment (Cooper Institute, 2007) as mandated by Texas Senate Bill 530. In the first study, undergraduate and graduate students who were trained to observe and assess student…

Through global learning about sustainability and preventive environmental strategies, the online learning course Young Masters Program has reached out to 110 countries. 20,000 high school students (14-18 years) world-wide have participated in globally extended classroom. The purpose is to analyze and describe the ways these students experienced…