Arts partnerships involving teachers, artists and arts organizations continue to be popular as a means of delivering arts education. Acting as an intermediary between schools and artists, arts brokers can be crucial to the successful implementation of these partnerships. Characterized as individuals who can act as channels for innovative practice,…

School leaders need effective, affordable approaches to retain their teacher workforce. We investigated a promising, low-cost option for school leaders to encourage teacher retention: subject-area specialization in elementary grades (K-5). Using data on North Carolina elementary grades teachers and schools in the 2011-2012 through 2015-2016…

How can primary literacy teachers effectively identify, adapt, and incorporate developmentally appropriate technologies to support their students' reading development? This article reports results from a case study attempting to digitize a classroom literacy practice--close reading--for Year 2 students. It suggests that digital tools can…

Many elementary teachers shy away from using expository literature for interactive read-alouds in their classrooms, preferring and privileging narrative texts over this type of nonfiction. This article first shares the complementary benefits of moving beyond fiction and narrative nonfiction in educators' read-aloud practices. Affordances include…

This paper explores the enactment of government policy during the COVID pandemic in primary schools in England. Based on interviews with school leaders and teachers across the period 2020-21 (n = 66), drawn from two major studies of primary schools' priorities during the crisis, we argue that school leaders' responses can be understood as a…

This article explores the potential of using children's literature in elementary mathematics classrooms as contexts for students to understand more fully the issues of equity, diversity, and inclusion. Informed by culturally responsive pedagogy, opportunities to link children's literature to mathematics education create cultural relevance for…

Education is increasingly infiltrated by technology and datafication. This techno-data amplification is entangled with neoliberalism and the emphasis on calculation and measurement it brings, often through metrics. This article critically examines how metrics are shaping discipline practices in schools through ClassDojo, a popular platform for…

Teaching writing is complex and research related to approaches that support students' understanding and outcomes in written assessment is prolific. Written aspects including text structure, purpose, and language conventions appear to be explicit elements teachers know how to teach. However, more qualitative and nuanced elements of writing such as…

In this article, we contribute to a discussion of ethics within school bullying research by reflecting on our own recent ethnographic study into the relations between school bullying and the institutional context of schooling conducted at three elementary schools and one lower-secondary school in Sweden. We argue for a reflexive, responsive, and…

Modern technology progresses at an incredibly fast pace. With personal computers, mobile phones, tablets, and the Internet, technology is used in all spheres, affecting our daily lives greatly. Educational games are also taking advantage of the technological process, for example, many useful apps are available for children. Gaming and educational…

Positioning students as competent is a teaching practice that uses specific, explicit affirmations to note that students have contributed something meaningful to the community of learners. It supports student agency in the mathematics classroom and contributes to the development of a positive mathematics identity. In this article, the authors…

One characteristic of high-quality mathematics teaching is supporting students in engaging in tasks of high cognitive demand. In this paper, we explore relationships between two elementary teachers' efforts to integrate computational thinking (CT) practices--abstraction, debugging, and decomposition--into their mathematics instruction and their…

In this paper, we draw on policy sociology and democratic theory to illustrate how evidence-based practice not only limits teachers' capacities to exercise professional discretion and authority, but also jeopardises the democratic project of schooling more broadly. Using theoretical concepts from Foucault's discipline with Connolly's…

As K-12 STEM education moves toward the integrated application of mathematics and science concepts in collaborative and complex real-world problem solving, there is a commensurate need to redefine what it means to be a STEM teacher in the early grades. Elementary teachers need more than professional development with innovative content and…

This article offers a framework for more equitable classroom reading assessment known as a Critical Assessment Practices (CAPS) approach. CAPS includes a set of four principles that teachers can use to partner with, and to empower, students to support more equitable and informative classroom-based reading assessment. Teachers can apply the CAPS…