Engagement doesn't just happen. As much as teachers would like it if their own fascination with content were contagious for every student, it doesn't work that way. Engagement must be planned for. A teacher discovers what's engaging in the content and designs curriculum so students discover it too. The authors profile one teacher…

The teen behavior typically exhibited in school visit groups is often read by museum teachers as resistance or disengagement, when the opposite is more likely the case. This paper attempts to dispel some of the myths around teen behavior and serve as a practical guide to museum educators who desire a deeper, more successful engagement with teen…

For most classroom teachers, recognizing when students are engaged in literacy activities--and perhaps more glaringly, when they are not--is a process that is key to evaluating the potential success of the instruction being offered. Students who are engaged have their eyes on what they are doing, are ardently attending to the teacher's read aloud…

How can a teacher make learning vocabulary and academic content meaningful to students from diverse cultural backgrounds? The author shares strategies for incorporating dynamic participatory processes into the classroom.

This follow-up report provides a revised Literacy Assignment Analysis Framework that incorporates discussion and teacher scaffolding. This new framework serves as a guidepost for studying sets of assignments across multiple days or weeks within a single classroom, school, or district. A closer look at more assignments from real classrooms provides…

Grading according to standards, competencies, or concepts is nothing new.With the current grading system gaining more scrutiny, parts of the basic framework of how we grade students are being questioned. Stephens (2010) and Marzano and Heflebower (2011) reinforced the notion that homework, behavior, attendance, notebooks, and group work should not…

When the author and her colleague asked teachers to list which qualities were most important without giving them a list to choose from, almost none mentioned curiosity. Many teachers endorse curiosity when they are asked about it, but it is not uppermost on their minds--or shaping their teaching plans. Why is this disturbing? Because research…

Wealth and assets have a reliable positive relationship with the achievement outcomes of students. Various approaches to understanding student achievement may inform the understanding of how wealth seems to influence children's educational experiences. This paper describes several perspectives from the student achievement literature within the…

In English as a foreign language (EFL) classes, teachers face the common challenge of demonstrating the importance of English to students who do not have much contact with users of English in their daily life. This often translates to a lack of progress in English language learning in settings such as Thailand, where in spite of the emphasis put…

This piece presents a theoretical exploration of the potential for the creation of policy that would inform the inclusion of arts and particularly theater courses in all community colleges. In April 2017, Fong et al. released a comprehensive meta-analysis that explored the relationship between psychosocial factors of self-perception and motivation…

In the gifted community, many voices offer research, information, and advice on what gifted children need. University professors who study gifted children share their findings through research, published articles, and books. State gifted education associations and the National Association for Gifted Children (NAGC) publish important information…

During inquiry investigations with third graders, the authors urge their students not to just make observations but also to record them. Inspired by Joel Fleishman's "A Joyful Noise: Poems for Two Voices" (1988), the authors developed an activity that increases students' motivation to record accurate and detailed observations. This…

Language learning motivation is one of vital factors which strongly correlates to the success in second language acquisition. Listening proficiency, as one of the basic language abilities, is paid much attention in English instruction, but presently the college English listening teaching is a weak link in English language teaching in China, which…

An old comedy routine on Saturday Night Live by Father Guido Sarducci introduced a "Five-Minute University," because five minutes is all that's remembered after graduation anyway. In counterpoint, we discuss "cycling," a teaching method for memory enhancement. Our principal implementation consists of offering a simple version…

Due to the growing obesity epidemic in the United States, educators must consider new ways to increase physical activity in an effort to address obesity. There are a variety of ways educators can increase physical activity in the classroom, and exergames--video games that require physical movement in order to play--are a modern-day approach to…