This piece focuses on creating a safe space for several subsets of the elementary school student population, including Muslim students, children with autism spectrum disorder, and students with social-emotional challenges. These groups do overlap and intersect, and they are united in their reliance on the library as a refuge. However, school…

Within the framework of comparative education studies, this article discusses the process of borrowing and implementing Complex Instruction (CI) in Europe, focusing on three different multicultural and heterogeneous educational contexts in Italy: five primary schools, a Master academic teaching course, and a first literacy course for migrant…

Studies of scientific practice demonstrate that the development of scientific models is an enactive and emergent process (e.g., Pickering 1995; Chandrasekharan and Nersessian 2017). Scientists make meaning through processes such as perspective taking, finding patterns, and following intuitions. In this paper, we focus on how a group of fourth…

The purpose of this article is to promote a deeper, more complex understanding of the challenge that "recess time" poses to elementary school educators and to thereby understand the practices in which they are currently engaging. Because teachers are expected to shepherd students through a vast array of learning standards while remaining…

Some teachers are confident in teaching science and some feel that they are less so. The author sees her role as Science Leader as being to support, engage and inspire staff to deliver an exciting curriculum that gets children to ask questions, build confidence to have a go…and have a go again. In this article, the author talks about using…

In an ever-increasing technological society, teachers have now, more than ever, a vast offering of educational technologies made available for classroom use. However, the time necessary for vetting and developing rigorous lessons with the usage of such technologies can be overwhelming for a classroom teacher. Still, teachers need the opportunity…

This paper was originally presented at the 25th Biennial Conference of AAMT, 'Capital Maths', and published in the Conference Proceedings. The author discusses the development and beginning implementation of a detailed sequence of concepts, with the intention of supporting teachers to support students to understand place value.

The Maker Movement (Dougherty 2012) highlights innovation and creativity through "activities focused on designing, building, modifying, and/or repurposing material objects, for playful or useful ends, oriented toward making a 'product' of some sort that can be used, interacted with, or demonstrated" (Martin 2015, p. 31). When engaged in…

In this challenge, the authors wanted to support students' knowledge of light and the ways in which it interacts with other materials through a series of connected learning experiences. These experiences are related to "NGSS standard 1-PS4-3 Waves and Their Applications in Technologies for Information Transfer. Plan and conduct investigations…

The authors illustrate the compatibility of building K-2 readers' foundational skills and their motivation for completing reading and related tasks within reading interventions. First, the authors introduce the orthographic mapping process, which requires foundational reading skills because of its role in facilitating fluent reading. Research…

From the beginning of the September 2020 school year, in an effort to engage children in school life again after a lengthy absence due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Rebecca Towner-Yates' school has adopted a 'quest' approach to learning. The concept has its roots firmly embedded in Dorothy Heathcote's 'Mantle of the Expert' (MoE) (Heathcote and…

As the conversation across the country progresses towards diversity and decolonisation of the curriculum, it is important to consider the many ways of demonstrating recognition of diversity. At Harris Garrard Academy in southeast London, educators have gone to great lengths to increase the visibility of race and ethnicity in the curriculum,…

The lack of diversity in some areas very much ties in with the data on school staff promotions and moving into senior positions. The United Kingdom government's schools workforce data shows black and Asian people are underrepresented in the teaching workforce. According to recent figures covering state schools in England: Just 4.7% of teachers in…

There is a tradition in primary classes of using rich authentic activities to teach science. The idea of pupils learning science through experiment and discovery is appealing. But this is not how children are taught in other subjects. When children learn to read, there are tiny steps, mastering each one before moving onto more challenging books.…

As a follow-up to their article, "Emojis and Their Place in the Mathematics Classroom" (EJ1358586), the authors examine how emojis can be used as bridging representations to support student understanding of proof and algebra in upper primary school. They take a problem from reSolve, Level 3, (AAMT, 2020), look at it from the perspective…