Understanding, crafting, and asking questions is a critical skill for all teachers, maybe even more so for social studies content, an area where educators may lack broad, in depth knowledge of the content. Having the ability to ask high level, critical thinking questions of students takes time and practice and a skill not often mastered or present…

This article describes The Bare Book Project, a writing and research project that challenged pre-service and in-service teachers to create their own original pieces of children's literature, and use aspects of their personal writing as models for students in elementary school classrooms. Building on research regarding teacher modeling in writing…

In this article, we share a framework for the purposeful design of presence in online courses. Instead of developing something new, we looked at two models that have helped us with previous instructional design projects, providing us with some assurance that the design decisions we were making were fundamentally sound. As we began to work with the…

In this article, we explain how the Discipline-based Art Education Model (DBAE) represents an instructional tool to disturb teacher candidates and elementary students' commonly held notions of US history, motivate research into historical events, and revise understandings of historical topics so that they begin seeing how the past has shaped the…

This work presents a proposed model in blended learning for a numerical methods course evolved from traditional teaching into a research lab in scientific visualization. The blended learning approach sets a differentiated and flexible scheme based on a mobile setup and face to face sessions centered on a net of research challenges. Model is…

This article describes an innovative model for teaching gerontological social work that has been introduced into the social work methods curriculum in the Department of Social Work at a college in northern Israel. The basic concept of the model is to create an alternative learning environment by including older persons as full participants in the…

Qualitative research is an inherent part of the human services profession, since it emphasizes the great and multifaceted complexity characterizing human experience and the sociocultural context in which humans act. In the department of human services at Emek Yezreel College, Israel, we have developed a three-phase model to ensure a relatively…

In an effort to teach students the basic knowledge of research methods and the realities of conducting research in the context of agencies in the community, faculty developed and implemented a service learning model for teaching research and program evaluation to foundation-year MSW students. A year-long foundation course was designed in which one…

Developing online learning communities is a promising pedagogical approach in online learning contexts for adult tertiary learners, but it is no easy task. Understanding how learning communities are formed and evaluating their efficacy in supporting learning involves a complex set of issues that have a bearing on the design and facilitation of…

This paper describes a pen pal partnership experience wherein undergraduate teacher education candidates enrolled in a Reading Language Arts Methods course and exchanged a series of 6-8 letters with elementary level children designated as having special needs. The project resulted in a number of benefits for both the children and the teacher…

The Sociology/Anthropology Articulation Committee has engaged in a project resulting in tandem reports for each of the respective disciplines, which identify flexible pre-majors for both Sociology and Anthropology and summarize the specific types of courses that must be taken by students to allow them to transfer into third year of a major. A…

In this article, the authors describe a cross course collaborative research project designed to provide students with an opportunity to integrate aspects of sociological study that are typically addressed in a compartmentalized course by course manner. They used this approach on two separate occasions. The first involved collaboration between a…

In this paper we describe a model for a science fair, within the context of an elementary science methods course. We first describe the theoretical perspectives from which the idea of science fairs derives and we provide definitions as we sketch the characteristics of commonly used science fairs. We then describe the context and processes of a…

This paper discusses an emerging unification theory of multiculturalism and global education called "transcultural universalism." The paper considers a "universal citizenship profile," of what it consists, and how it is formed. The paper asks four questions: (1) What key citizenship characteristics are essential for today's…

This paper presents three reasons why teachers should understand and actively use models and model building to frame science. First, science model building and testing is the heart of scientific enterprise, and understanding of the process is crucial for developing scientific literacy. Second, models are a familiar framework through which to…