In October of 2010, Canadian Education Association (CEA), in conjunction with colleagues from SCOPE (Stanford Centre for Opportunity Policy in Education), hosted an event entitled "Achieving Equity through Innovation: A Canada-United States Colloquium." This two-day event provided an important platform for the exchange of ideas,…

School and classroom structures designed to meet the needs of the industrial past cannot "maintain the temperature required for sustaining life." Recent learning sciences research findings compel educators to invent new learning environments better suited to meet the demands of the 21st century. These new learning environments require…

In many educational jurisdictions, the responses to student disengagement and behaviour problems have been restrictive or punitive; they include on-site police officers, locker searches, metal detectors, and zero tolerance policies. There is little evidence that such strategies are effective in changing behaviour, attitudes, or achievement.…

Through the discoveries of neuroscience, educators have moved beyond the intuitive knowledge of how and when learning occurs to a demonstrated scientific understanding of the learning process itself. These new understandings have a two-fold appeal to educators: they allow them to design better, research-based teaching practices, and they help them…

For at least twenty years educators have wrestled with questions about the appropriate uses of computer technologies in classrooms while spending millions of dollars with neither clarity of purpose nor defined expectations. The private uses of communications technologies by children and youth leave everyone, with a different question--not whether…

The opinions concerning the differences between their school systems of sixty male and female French and French Canadian school-masters who engaged in an exchange program during the 1969-70 academic year were surveyed and the results analyzed. (CK)

Describes "Salon de la Femme," Montreal's short educational programs for working class or low-income women, held in 1979 and 1980; describes the "open environment" of the programs; and notes the most successful topics, meeting locations, and intervention methods used, as well as the problems that arose. (SB)

A simple method, based on a short list of considerations students might make when involved in value-related situations can quickly show teachers the relative merits of the several reflective approaches to values education. The method is useful in building classroom lessons and helping students explore the ethics of their actions. (SB)

What do teachers know about what is happening in classrooms other than their own? Surprisingly little. And what they do know certainly is not from first hand observation. Discusses how beginning teachers can learn how experienced teachers conduct their classes thereby building their own teaching expertise. (Author/RK)

Classroom life was observed for six weeks in four British Columbia classrooms: Grades one, four, split-grade six/seven, and nine. Despite differences in teaching styles and methods, classroom environments were similar, demonstrating active student engagement, shared enjoyment, and guided independent thinking. Teacher attitudes toward mandated…

In the quest for engaging, effective literacy instruction, the author argues that elementary reading instruction should balance systematic skills instruction with rich children's literacy experiences and opportunities to learn how to read and write. He posits that engaging and effective primary grades classrooms are very positive places where…

Although the single-grade classroom has emerged as the most prevalent administrative arrangement, the existence of the split grade phenomenon continues to be a part of educational tradition in both rural and urban schools, predominantly at the elementary levels. Teachers are then forced to compromise curriculum to teach all levels simultaneously.…

Describes how a primary teacher handled an argument among her students over what to do about army worms defoliating an apple tree, thereby illustrating how she cultivates a classroom community that nurtures democracy. Such stories of morally coherent practices counter the bureaucratic insistence on a narrowly construed outcomes-based education.…