In Japan during the 1980s, there was an interesting debate about how to teach the area of a parallelogram effectively to primary school children. Yutaka Saeki criticized the standard method, which relies on a cut-and-paste procedure. He argued that the standard method inevitably failed to convince children because it does not provide any cogent…

School systems across the world are working to make the classroom more inclusive for all children, regardless of their origin and capacities, so that they have equal opportunities for quality learning. It has become essential to integrate students with special needs into mainstream formal education and they are, increasingly, enrolled in regular…

Research from dual and bilingual education programs shows that the use of a student's home language for reading instruction is one of the most beneficial practices for multilingual learners. Given the plethora of home languages encountered in public schools, how can teachers who do not speak the languages of their students utilize a student's home…

In this article, based on a longitudinal study that the author conducted in a primary school in Japan, a methodology for assessing the long-term impact of music education is discussed. With the intention of understanding the meaning of primary music education from the perspectives of the learners, retrospective data were collected from former…

Recently a team of third- and fourth-grade teachers tested instructional ideas on the topic of division with remainders (DWR) using lesson study. The Common Core State Standards for Mathematics give little attention to the concept of the remainder, specifying only that students are to solve problems for which remainders must be interpreted (NGA…

As Japanese Ministry of Education educational mandates for implementation by 2020 press on public school administrators, teachers, students, and communities, the Sustainable Programming Education proposes strategies for addressing English and programming education curricula in the elementary and middle schools. Sustainability resides in the…

The Australian Science Teachers Association offers an innovative international professional development program for science teachers called the Science Teachers Exchange -- Japan. The program offers Australian and Japanese teachers an opportunity to travel to the corresponding country, allowing the teachers to grow in their knowledge of the…

As Japan prepares for the 2020 Summer Olympics, the elementary school English curriculum is rapidly changing, with new textbooks and more class hours devoted to English education. These language classes have the potential to clarify and improve students' perceptions of global cultures, including their own. Accordingly, the purpose of this paper is…

Problem solving has been a major theme in Japanese mathematics curricula for nearly 50 years. Numerous teacher reference books and lesson plans using problem solving have been published since the 1960s. Government-authorized mathematics textbooks for elementary grades, published by six private companies, have had more and more problem solving over…

In summarizing this report Danielle Spencer states: "Japan truly was transformational for me. At that time I saw myself as a nurse just pretending to be a teacher. The Australia-Japan Foundation (AJF), Japan exchange enabled me to be a teacher who used to be a nurse." How did this transformation come about? Each year, a national…

This paper describes a pedagogical framework that teachers can use to support students who are engaged in solving open-ended problems, by explaining how two Japanese expert teachers successfully apply open-ended problems in their mathematics class. The Open-Ended Approach (OPA) framework consists of two main sections: Understanding Mathematical…

As part of Japanese Lesson study research focusing on "comparing and describing likelihoods", fifth grade elementary students used real-world data in decision-making. Sporting statistics facilitated opportunities for informal inference, where data were used to make and justify predictions.

An adaptive learning system is proposed that incorporates a Bayesian network to efficiently gauge learners' understanding at the course-unit level. Also, learners receive content that is adapted to their measured level of understanding. The system works on an iPad via the Edmodo platform. A field experiment using the system in an elementary school…

This report highlights findings from the "Happy Schools Project: Capacity Building for Learner Well-being in the Asia-Pacific (Phase II)" pilots in Japan, Lao PDR and Thailand from 2018-2020. The aim of the pilots was to promote happiness in schools through enhanced learner well-being, social emotional learning and holistic development…

This paper discusses human relationships with the natural world in Japanese educational policy. Based on two case studies, we argue that policy must recognize the cultural and spiritual ties that people in Japan have fostered in order to live well, which this paper considers to be part of "re-wilding education policy." We briefly review…