Background/Context: Learning to meet students' needs challenges new teachers often focused on procedures, management, materials, and curriculum. To avoid this development pattern, student teachers (STs) need opportunities to concentrate especially on needs of culturally and linguistically diverse (CLD) students. Teacher inquiry (TI) holds promise…

In this article, teacher action research is positioned as a bridge connecting research, practice, and policy--as an important and practical way to engage teachers as consumers of research, as researchers of their own practice, as designers of their own professional development, and as informants to scholars and policy-makers regarding critical…

Background/Context: Significant research has been done on the cognitive and academic outcomes of older-younger and peer-peer student relationships. Whether in a one-on-one setting or a setting in which responsibility for teaching is shared among members of a collaborative group, well-planned, well-organized, and well-executed student-student…

Background/Context: Discussion in classrooms has been cited as an activity integral to active participation in a democracy. Much research into classroom practice reveals that recitation, not discussion, is the most common form of classroom discourse. How teachers conceive of discussion, what they actually do when they attempt discussion with…

This article reports on a two-year qualitative, practitioner-research study of teaching and learning for social justice. The site was my middle-school mathematics classroom in a Chicago public school in a Latino/a community. A major pedagogical goal was to create conditions for students to develop agency, a sense of themselves as subjects in the…

Background/Context: A review of the literature demonstrates that grade retention often fails to improve the academic and socioemotional outcomes of retained students. Although little empirical work on peer tutoring has focused specifically on retained students, the literature suggests that those students who act as peer tutors often experience…

Background/Context: Portfolio assessment is a popular form of authentic assessment, but often portfolios become simply folders full of papers rather than student reflections on their work. Purpose/Objective/Research Question/Focus of Study: The author conducted a study aiming to help the ninth-grade students in his English language arts classroom…

Background/Context: Metacognition has been a subject of study for cognitive theorists, behaviorists, educators, and others. The term metacognition has traditionally and simply been defined as "thinking about thinking," yet it describes a complex process that can result in a nuanced understanding of oneself as a thinker and a learner. Metacognition…

Background/Context: Research on after-school programs has traditionally focused on those programs serving students in younger grades but found positive correlations between student participation in enriching after-school activities and school engagement. For older students, particularly teenagers, there tends to be lower participation. Research…

Background/Context: This study is based on prior research regarding the need for explicit social instruction for children with special needs, cooperative educational models, and the goals and relative successes of inclusive educational practices. The author refers to several studies on these subjects, including those by Kavale and Forness; Salend;…

Discusses the importance of teachers and researchers learning to appreciate one another's professional roles to bridge the gap between research and practice. Information comes from meetings between teachers and researchers as part of a three-year study to discover how moral concerns permeate school life. (SM)

In this article we address questions raised by the research methods used in teacher research by exploring a particular approach to teacher research. This approach is based in teachers' concerns with underachieving children, particularly those who come from diverse cultural and linguistic backgrounds. It grows out of the work of the Brookline…

Discusses three theoretical structures (those of Michael Polanyi, Maxine Greene, and Ann Berthoff) which consider the role of personal interpretation central to ultimate meaning-making. The article proposes them as useful frameworks for teachers who are beginning deliberate classroom research. (IAH)

Practitioner research is a topic of growing interest and scholarly writing in the field of education in general and adult education in particular. This article describes a particular form of practitioner research that rests on a participatory worldview and draws heavily from theory and practice in adult learning and action research.…

Systematic intentional inquiry by teachers makes accessible some of teachers' expertise and provides universities and schools with unique perspectives on teaching and learning. A four-part working typology of teacher research is proposed, with examples of the four types: journals, essays, oral inquiry processes, and classroom studies. (IAH)