Communities have their own set of cultural values that make their way into their classrooms and serve as criteria for the labeling of "insider" or "outsider." This article describes how critical empathy can allow the barriers between these constructs to be broken down as students are given the chance not only to listen but to…

How do we support learning and teaching about complex issues? Researchers from the University of Auckland worked with 54 students and teachers from three Auckland secondary schools to evaluate health-science learning designed to investigate this question. The instructional strategies based on context familiarity, systems thinking, and narrative…

Building on research showing social-emotional benefits from a single live theater performance, this study tests for significant differences in pre to post social-cognitive outcomes among a racially and economically diverse sample of young audiences who attended the same theater performance with or without additional pre- and post-show educational…

The dual pandemics of social unrest and COVID-19 during the summer of 2020 in the United States has produced a renewed sense of urgency and agency for the interrogation of curriculum in K-12 education and the development of culturally sustaining practices. This urgency has encouraged more teacher preparation programs and middle school leaders to…

Actively open-minded thinking (AOT) is a crucial aspect in the education of adolescents; however, it has been insufficiently researched in the Spanish context. The purpose of this study is to analyse AOT and its relationship to critical thinking skills and personality. The participants in this research comprise 877 Spanish secondary school…

Bilinguals often outperform monolinguals at apprehending the perspectives of others--an apparent consequence of their experiences moving across linguistic and sociocultural contexts. Whether English learners' (ELs') use of such skill in academic writing may be affected by literacy curriculum is the focus of this study. The study explored students'…

Computational thinking (CT) is an analytical thinking approach to solving daily problems by utilizing fundamental concepts of computer science. In the past decade, CT has been regarded as an essential life skill to be taught to everyone, especially young learners. One overarching and unresolved issue related to including CT into the K-12…

Philosophy for Children (P4C) hopes to cultivate democratic dialogue as well as critical, creative, and caring thinking; the latter of which has been associated with students' social and emotional competencies (SECs) like empathy and perspective-taking. Yet, empirical, randomized studies on the effectiveness of P4C on students' SECs and sense of…

Mathematics teachers make a number of decisions that shape their lessons, which therein impact their students' opportunity to learn mathematics. Past research has often focused on teachers, students and the mathematical content as key classroom elements that drive teachers' decisions. In this article, we propose that a fourth element -- the…

This guide, developed by the American Psychological Association's Coalition for Psychology in Schools and Education and Ethics Committee is designed for educators and includes a self-assessment for students ages 12 to 18 to reflect on and improve their civil discourse skills. The tool targets five values related to civil discourse and their…

We present an empirically based model for modeling the quality of pre-service teacher reflection. Conversations from twelve groups of a total of 47 pre-service teachers were video recorded and transcribed verbatim. First, we analyzed their conversations through practical epistemology analysis and an operationalization of Dewey's definition of…

This study explored how adopting an empathy education framework and strategies for teacher empathy modeling and student-centered learning experiences cultivates more empathy in middle school classrooms. This study extended the work of Snead et al. (2016) entitled "Challenge Course Work around Teaching Empathy in the Classroom."…

This study is an aesthetic inquiry, as part of a middle school visual arts class, from the standpoint of Maxine Greene's aesthetic perspective in education. By adopting Maxine Greene's perspective, affective learning comes to the fore along with cognitive learning, and accentuates multiple realities through the imagination through the research…

The social unrest during the summer of 2020 in the United States has produced a renewed sense of urgency and agency for the interrogation of curriculum in K-12 education and the development of culturally sustaining practices. This urgency has encouraged more teacher preparation programs to be intentional in developing culturally sustaining…

Students' critical thinking is often researched using quantitative tests designed to measure critical thinking. In contrast, this study qualitatively analyses group and whole-class dialogues in an interdisciplinary SSI project by focusing on students' critical thinking practices. As such, the study provides an in-depth example of an immersion…