Teaching controversial issues can be challenging for any teacher, but especially so when the teacher is a cultural outsider. In this article, we provide a snapshot of one social studies educator's experiences teaching about two hotly contested elections--the 2016 U.S. presidential election and the 2017 Korean special election--to middle school…

This fourth of six briefs analyzing data from the 2020-2021 Civil Rights Data Collection (CRDC), released earlier this year, focuses on the experiences of students with disabilities with disciplinary practices at both charter schools and traditional public schools. Though the COVID-19 pandemic was still in its early stages, concerns about the…

In this essay, we argue institutional lenses are a vital but largely missing part of understanding how 1:1 technology programs can effect change in teaching and learning in middle schools. Indeed, while current research highlights the positive effects of technology integration efforts, and 1:1 programs in particular have on student learning and…

Increasing levels of student diversity, and inequality, frame the conditions of schooling in the contemporary moment. Initial teacher education has also been criticised for falling short in adequately preparing pre-service teachers who can cater for the needs of diverse student learners. This paper enters this discursive field and takes a specific…

Can we teach children and young adults about reading while simultaneously and inseparably teaching them how to take control of their own lives and relationships, a possibility that has been just barely touched by research and even less so by educational policies and practice? This address highlights research findings that suggest the promise of…

Academic self-efficacy is a student's belief in their ability to perform within a school environment. Prior research shows that students experience a drop in academic self-efficacy during middle school that is particularly steep for female students and results in lower self-efficacy for girls than boys throughout middle and high school. In this…

Experienced teachers, researchers and mathematics community members, contributed to the documentation of the professional vocabulary of teachers to describe the pedagogical practice of the middle school mathematics classroom. In this paper we use this Australian Lexicon to study which terms teachers deem essential for their classroom practice. We…

The emotional intensities of gifted students affect not only their learning, but the way they live and see the world. This article examines the Theory of Positive Disintegration of Dabrowski (1964, 1972) to explore the inner world of the gifted. The five levels of development and five overexcitabilities of Dabrowski represent an abundance of…

Purpose: The purpose of this study is to better understand the ways in which K-8 teachers from a semirural, predominantly white district perceive their responsibilities to work toward anti-racism, as well as to learn more about how the teachers can be supported as they work to overcome the challenges facing teachers in these fraught times in this…

The author, a former middle school teacher and now an associate professor at The University of Minnesota, was asked to write an essay for the inaugural issue of this journal that: (1) advanced the call for a more diverse dialogue in the field of middle grades education; and (2) addressed the question, "Why do we need more provocative debate…

Educators need actionable information about student progress during the school year. This paper explores an approach to this problem in the writing domain that combines three measurement approaches intended for use in interim-assessment fashion: scenario-based assessments (SBAs), to simulate authentic classroom tasks, automated writing evaluation…

Educational institutions are more concentrated on preferable measured outcomes rather than theoretical ones. Measuring subject knowledge obtains through written examination is easy, even as skills such as critical and logical thinking, decision making, problem-solving ability, creative thinking are difficult to measure. The education field is…

In our rapidly changing world, the role of education is not only to pass on knowledge, because the acquired knowledge will be quickly expired, the different professions are also changing in a short time. It would be also important to pass on a kind of ability which the students will be able to independently acquire knowledge after completing their…

Our goal in this article is to organise an epistemological matrix for the concept of rational number that contemplates its different meanings. Aiming at understanding the various ways to signify the rational numbers and based on the theoretical-methodological approach of conceptual profiles, we produce and analyse data from various sources,…

The Wake County Public School System (WCPSS) conducts a student survey in the spring of each year to determine the level of student engagement in and out of the classroom. Students who actively participate in their learning process generally experience higher academic achievement (Wang & Hofkens, 2020). The survey contains items from the…