Teacher evaluation systems treat instructional quality as generic. Principals often observe elementary teachers in one subject and generalize assessments to all subjects. However, there is little empirical work to justify these decisions. This study provides needed evidence about whether elementary teachers engage in comparable instruction across…

The authors present the individual and collective results of a university-wide initiative to institutionalize a hybrid pedagogical approach--Creative Inquiry--across multiple academic disciplines. The program is intended to systematically combine inquiry-guided learning and creative thinking in order to further enhance the depth and breadth of…

Every Classroom, Every Day (ECED) is a set of instructional improvement interventions designed to increase student achievement in math and English/language arts (ELA). ECED includes three primary components: (a) systematic classroom observations by school leaders, (b) intensive professional development and support for math teachers and…

Many people, particularly teachers and students, associate vocabulary instruction with long lists of ambiguous words, copying the definitions from the dictionary by rote, completing accompanying analogies, or matching the words with their meanings and taking a quiz at the end of the week. This approach to vocabulary instruction is typical to many…

This article presents a course design of English 450: Theories and Methods of Argument. The course is an upper level course in the Writing concentration of B. A. in English and American Language and Literature at the University of Tennessee, Chattanooga, a metropolitan university in the South. At the 400 level, Theories and Methods of Argument is…

Current theoretical conversations in the field of Rhetoric and Composition, particularly conversations related to first-year curricular design, are increasingly concerned with the issue of "teaching for transfer." While developing successful transfer pedagogy is a challenging undertaking, one that may require writing instructors to…

Of 493 English teachers surveyed, 114 responded to questions concerning their attitudes about teaching writing skills, problems they faced in teaching writing, methods used to teach writing skills, amount of time spent in teaching writing skills, and the students' writing abilities. (NQ)

The five articles in this journal issue discuss attempts to censor certain nonprint media in the schools, the conflict between intellectual freedom and community values, recent efforts by Tennessee educators and librarians to achieve a better measure of intellectual freedom, the need for English teachers to reexamine their teaching methods and…

A modified multiple baseline across behaviors design was used to evaluate the effects of an interdependent group contingency program with randomly selected contingency components on the academic performance of an intact middle-school class serving five male students with serious emotional disturbance (SED). During the initial intervention phase,…