Most teachers have experienced the "blank stare" when after teaching a lesson implementing all their best strategies using their best language-learning English and at the moment of releasing responsibility--that is, moving from the teacher's responsibility to prepare students for the task to their responsibility to carry it out--the…

Debates continue about how high-stakes testing regimes influence schools at all levels: their impact on teaching practices, distribution of resources and curriculum provision, and whether they achieve the intended increases in student achievement in targeted areas. In 2008, the Australian government Introduced a national testing scheme, the"…

Reflecting on the experience of being a participant in the Work of Teacher Education (WoTE) research, and drawing on conceptualisations of teacher education as "domestic labour," I argue that teacher educators' closeness to classroom practice acts as a determining factor in their symbolic annihilation, a concept usually applied to study…

In general, newer educational assessments are deemed more demanding challenges than students are currently prepared to face. Two types of factors may contribute to the test scores: (1) factors or dimensions that are of primary interest to the construct or test domain; and, (2) factors or dimensions that are irrelevant to the construct, causing…

Discusses reflective practice and suggests that participants in computer-mediated conferencing can be encouraged to engage in reflecting about onscreen experiences with the help of a trained moderator. Provides examples from Open University (United Kingdom) classes and concludes that reflective practice helps participants to learn online and…

I respond to Zeyer and Roth's ("Cultural Studies of Science Education," 2009) paper on their use of interpretive repertoire analysis to explicate Swiss middle school students' dialogic responses to environmental issues. I focus on the strategy of interpretive repertoire analysis, making sense of the stance Zeyer and Roth take with this analysis by…

This paper is about: developing critical understandings about the nature and origins of one's personal and professional identity; learning how to transform uncritically internalised and potentially damaging conceptualisations of identity and identity formation; saying why it is important to do so; and considering what kinds of texts can show the…

Indulging in recounting a few salient memories of what seems now like a dim and distant past, I raise questions about the ebb and flow, the waxing and waning of salient themes in mathematics education. I mention some of the most inspirational influences on my thinking and on my behaviour with learners of all ages. I take the opportunity to ask…

Since the early 1980s educators have argued that reflection is an essential dimension of good pedagogical practice. This discussion of my attempt to support a constructivist approach to learning for three different groups of learners illustrates one effort to engage in such reflection. I analyze several assignments I have designed for differently…

Environmentalists are accustomed to using the rhetorical appeals of guilt and sacrifice to advocate their agendas. I argue that the motivations of guilt and sacrifice do not mirror the goals of sustainability, and are easy for anthropocentric-resourcist ideology (ARI) agendas to counter. When it comes to actual environmental policy change,…

From the pragmatists to the neo-Piagetians, development has been understood to involve cycles of perception and action--the internalization of interactions with the world and the construction of skills for acting in the world. From a neurobiological standpoint, new evidence suggests that neural activities related to action and perception converge…

The demographics of classroom teachers and teacher educators do not mirror the diversity found in today's schools. As we prepare preservice teachers to be quality educators for all students, we must work to ensure that they are examining issues of equity and diversity that will affect those they teach. This article explores this challenge from my…

The purpose of this study is to explore the ways in which five educational leaders make use of online social network sites (SNSs) for their personal and professional learning. Specifically, I focus on how participants use social networking tools to create and maintain online learning communities, how they interact within these communities, and how…

Research over the last decades has shown that language development in its multiple forms is characterized by a succession of stable and unstable states. However, the variation observed is neither expected nor can it be accounted for on the basis of traditional learning concepts conceived of within the Universal Grammar (UG) paradigm. In this…

A primary function of prosody in many languages is to convey information structure--the "packaging" of a sentence's content into categories such as "focus", "given" and "topic". In English and other West Germanic languages it is widely assumed that focus is signaled prosodically by the location of a…