Teacher-pupil planning means teachers and students working in a partnership to articulate a problem/concern, develop objectives, locate materials/resources, and evaluate progress. The intent of this volume of Middle Level Education and the Self-Enhancing School titled, "School is Life, Not a Preparation for Life"-John Dewey: Democratic Practices in Middle Grades Education, is to take the thoughts about the middle grades school curriculum presented in volume one (Middle Grades Curriculum: Voices and Visions of the Self-Enhancing School) and demonstrate the efforts taking place in teacher education programs and middle grades classrooms today. Volume two is organized into two parts, efforts within teacher education programs and efforts of practitioners in the middle grades classrooms. We asked authors in both contexts to address the following questions: 1. Antecedents: What knowledge, skills and dispositions must be in place in all stakeholders to have teacherpupil planning serve a central role in the middle grades teacher education program or middle grades classroom? 2. Implementation: What does the teacher-pupil planning process look like within your teacher education program or middle grades classroom? 3. Outcomes: What benefits (knowledge, skills, and dispositions) are derived from the implementation of teacher-pupil planning in your teacher education program or your middle grades classroom?

Today's teachers are expected to meet the needs of a range of diverse and multicultural learners in their classrooms, ensuring that they create favourable conditions for learning. This can be a daunting task, particularly for beginners, as it is only through teaching practice that student teachers develop important professional knowledge about themselves, fellow teachers, learners, their communities and the teaching profession as a whole. Teaching practice in an African context is an essential guide for both students and experienced teachers, providing the insight and skills they need to navigate South African schools. Teaching practice in an African context is informed by the principles of Africanisation and ubuntu, and is written in a clear, conversational style. It encourages reflection on the various practical aspects of teaching, leading to better education practice and thus improving performance. Teaching practice in an African context is aimed at undergraduate education students as well as qualified teachers already in practice.

Various pedagogies, including the use of digital learning in education, have been used and researched for the past 40 years, but schools have little to show for these initiatives. This contrasts starkly with technology-supported initiatives in other fields such as business, health care, and the military. Traditional pedagogies and general digital technology applications have yet impact education in significant ways that transforms learning. This handbook posits that a primary reason for this minimal impact on learning is that digital technologies have attempted to make traditional instructional processes more efficient rather than using a more appropriate paradigm for learning. As there have been transformative applications in other fields, the book will identify suggested transformative applications that empower learners. As technology is used as a partner in other fields, transformative applications become partners with students (not teachers) to empower their learning process in and out of school. This handbook identifies and justifies the paradigm of transformative learning and pedagogies in education, provides exemplars of existing transformative applications that, if used as partners to empower student learning, have the potential to dramatically engage students in a kind of learning that better fits 21st century learners, and provides pedagogical models to help teachers empower students to learn.

This book challenges us to 'think anew' about teaching and teacher education. It explores the nature of quality in teaching and teacher education, and addresses emerging and potentially redefining challenges for teaching, learning, and teacher education for our times. At the centre of the discussion are the tenets of education, teaching profession, and a values-centred vision of teacher education. The book is rooted in rich, contemporary research and reflects the context of (post)pandemic practice and a fast-changing policy environment. It provides new understandings on the topic at hand, and it will be useful to readers from across a range of domains and interests concerning teaching, teacher values-education, and professional practice. Contributors are: Ana Isabel Andrade, Bjoern Astrand, Helen Caldwell, Stephane Colognesi, Saraa Salim Dawood, Anna-Barbara du Plessis, Irma Eloff, Maria Assuncao Flores, Conor Galvin, A. Lin Goodwin, Qing Gu, Kathy Hall, Carol Hordatt Gentles, Washington Ires Correa, Fawzi Habeeb Jabrail, Panagiotis Kampylis, Daria Khanolainen, Monica Lourenco, Marilyn Leask, Kay Livingston, Joanna Madalinska-Michalak, Virginie Marz, Deirbhile Nic Craith, Hannele Pitkanen, Helle Plauborg, Noel Purdy, Felix Senger, Marco Snoek, Vasileios Symeonidis, Gisselle Tur Porres, Heike Wendt, Saraa Younie and Amal Fatah Zedan.

While the growth of computational thinking has brought new awareness to the importance of computing education, it has also created new challenges. Many educational initiatives focus solely on the programming aspects, such as variables, loops, conditionals, parallelism, operators, and data handling, divorcing computing from real-world contexts and applications. This decontextualization threatens to make learners believe that they do not need to learn computing, as they cannot envision a future in which they will need to use it, just as many see math and physics education as unnecessary. The Handbook of Research on Tools for Teaching Computational Thinking in P-12 Education is a cutting-edge research publication that examines the implementation of computational thinking into school curriculum in order to develop creative problem-solving skills and to build a computational identity which will allow for future STEM growth. Moreover, the book advocates for a new approach to computing education that argues that while learning about computing, young people should also have opportunities to create with computing, which will have a direct impact on their lives and their communities. Featuring a wide range of topics such as assessment, digital teaching, and educational robotics, this book is ideal for academicians, instructional designers, teachers, education professionals, administrators, researchers, and students.

In the past few decades, there has been a growing interest in the benefits of linking the learning of a foreign language to the study of its literature. However, the incorporation of literary texts into language curriculum is not easy to tackle. As a result, it is vital to explore the latest developments in text-based teaching in which language, culture, and literature are taught as a continuum. Teaching Literature and Language Through Multimodal Texts provides innovative insights into multiple language teaching modalities for the teaching of language through literature in the context of primary, secondary, and higher education. It covers a wide range of good practice and innovative ideas and offers insights on the impact of such practice on learners, with the intention to inspire other teachers to reconsider their own teaching practices. It is a vital reference source for educators, professionals, school administrators, researchers, and practitioners interested in teaching literature and language through multimodal texts.

How does a teacher meet the needs of all learners amid the realities of day-to-day teaching? Patti Drapeau shows us how in this practical book. She offers several strategies, including pacing instruction, varying the depth of content, widening or narrowing the breadth of topics, and altering the complexity of questions. She also shows teachers how to make them work, through tiered task cards, differentiated learning centers, and more. For use with Grades 3-6.

Writing comprises a significant proportion of academic staff members' roles. While academics have been acculturated to the notion of 'publish or perish,' they often struggle to find the time to accomplish writing papers and tend to work alone. The result can be a sense of significant stress and isolation around the writing process. Writing partnerships, groups, and retreats help mitigate these challenges and provide significant positive writing experiences for their members. Critical Collaborative Communities describes diverse examples of partnerships from writing regularly with one or two colleagues to larger groups that meet for a single day, regular writing meetings, or a retreat over several days. While these approaches bring mutual support for members, each is not without its respective challenges. Each chapter outlines an approach to writing partnerships and interrogates its strengths and limitations as well as proposes recommendations for others hoping to implement the practice. Authors in this volume describe how they have built significant trusting relationships that have helped avoid isolation and have led to their self-authorship as academic writers.

This book challenges us to 'think anew' about teaching and teacher education. It explores the nature of quality in teaching and teacher education, and addresses emerging and potentially redefining challenges for teaching, learning, and teacher education for our times. At the centre of the discussion are the tenets of education, teaching profession, and a values-centred vision of teacher education. The book is rooted in rich, contemporary research and reflects the context of (post)pandemic practice and a fast-changing policy environment. It provides new understandings on the topic at hand, and it will be useful to readers from across a range of domains and interests concerning teaching, teacher values-education, and professional practice. Contributors are: Ana Isabel Andrade, Bjoern Astrand, Helen Caldwell, Stephane Colognesi, Saraa Salim Dawood, Anna-Barbara du Plessis, Irma Eloff, Maria Assuncao Flores, Conor Galvin, A. Lin Goodwin, Qing Gu, Kathy Hall, Carol Hordatt Gentles, Washington Ires Correa, Fawzi Habeeb Jabrail, Panagiotis Kampylis, Daria Khanolainen, Monica Lourenco, Marilyn Leask, Kay Livingston, Joanna Madalinska-Michalak, Virginie Marz, Deirbhile Nic Craith, Hannele Pitkanen, Helle Plauborg, Noel Purdy, Felix Senger, Marco Snoek, Vasileios Symeonidis, Gisselle Tur Porres, Heike Wendt, Saraa Younie and Amal Fatah Zedan.

Due to various challenges within the public-school system, such as underfunding, lack of resources, and difficulty retaining and recruiting teachers of color, minority students have been found to be underperforming compared to their majority counterparts. Minority students deserve quality public education, which can only happen if the gap in equity and access is closed. In order to close this achievement gap between the majority and minority groups, it is critical to increase the learning gains of the minority students. Digital Games for Minority Student Engagement: Emerging Research and Opportunities is an essential reference source that argues that digital games can potentially help to solve the problems of minority students' insufficient academic preparation, and that a game-based learning environment can help to engage these students with the content and facilitate academic achievement. Featuring research on topics such as education policy, interactive learning, and student engagement, this book is ideally designed for educators, principals, policymakers, academicians, administrators, researchers, and students.

This exciting addition to scholarly practice showcases a range of invited national and international authors who bring together their expertise, knowledge and previous studies to this edition. It is the fourth book in the series "Global Education in the 21st Century" and focuses upon mentoring in education. What is evident within each of the chapters and is a theme throughout this book is the constant search to articulate the mentoring relationship and to explore within each diverse context the effect of this relationship upon those involved. This thread of intentional discovery is both exciting and exhaustive. What is clear when the totality of chapters are now examined and the key lessons to be learnt are derived, is that the adoption of any one approach and theoretical framework for mentoring in educational contexts is likely to be fraught. That is, the authors have expertly explored both the challenges and advantages of their specific context and the powerful lessons within each context, clearly illustrating the relevance and interrelationship of the context to the mentoring approach. This prevailing message presents significant challenges for educators, setting up a tension between the various aspects of mentoring such as nurturing, imitation, reflective practice and disruptive challenging. When overlaid with the possibility of a shifting transformational role between the mentor and the mentee, the challenges appear vast. But the passion and spirit of the search is also evident in each of the chapters presented here and the overall conclusion of the combined chapters making up the authority of the book is the ardour and voice of educational contexts and diversity, framed in the professional development and learning scaffolds supplied by each of the authors. It is this commitment that will sustain education and mentoring well into the future. Contributors are: Veysel Akcakin, Anastasios (Tasos) Barkatsas, Tania Broadley, Andrea Chester, Anthony Clarke, Angela Clarke, Yuksel Dede, Kathy Jordan, Gurcan Kaya, Huk-Yuen Law, Kathy Littlewood, Darren Lingley, Tricia McLaughlin, Juanjo Mena, Peter Saunders, Naomi Wilks-Smith, Dallas Wingrove, and Sophia Xenos.

Education is a field in which reflective practice is not only imperative for teacher and student success, but also for maintaining the desire to remain in the profession. During times of uncertainty, particularly as we faced the dual pandemics of social injustice and COVID-19 over the past year, we have felt demoralized and powerless. We know that we are not alone, as research indicates burnout, particularly among educators, is well-documented and increasing as a result of the continued heavy workload and added individual and societal stressors of the past year. During this turmoil, we have found solace, comfort, and connection in reflecting on our educational paths and sharing our stories with each other, friends, and colleagues. These reflective experiences, both individual and shared, have been powerful, rekindling our passion and desire to teach and thinking about ways we can support our students in and beyond the current climate of social unrest and a global pandemic. We believe that reading reflections of others' experiences will remind readers that they are not alone in their work, provide opportunities for them to find connections with fellow educators, and encourage them to engage in reflective practices of their own. The book is a timely collection of stories from various groups of people, such as those who identify as mothers, fathers, people of color, LGBTQIA scholars, first-generation college students, retired educators, those new to academia, and those with established academic careers, in an attempt to create a book where scholars can see themselves reflected in the stories of others, re-igniting the passion that led them to academia. This book is ideal for higher education faculty, those seeking to enter academia, educators who have left the classroom for administrative roles such as principals, assistant principals, instructional coaches, and district leaders, those considering a career in academia, and those in graduate degree programs.

Rich Pickings: Creative Professional Development Activities for University Teachers offers both inspiration and practical advice for academics who want to develop their teaching in ways that go beyond the merely technical, and for the academic developers who support them. Advocating active engagement with literary and nonliterary texts as one way of prompting deep thinking about teaching practice and teacher identities, Daphne Loads shows how to read poems, stories, academic papers and policy documents in ways that stay with the physicality of words: how they sound, how they look on the page or the screen, how they feel in the mouth. She invites readers to bring into play associations, allusions, memories and insights, to examine their own ways of meaning making and to ask what all of this means for their development as teachers. Bringing together scholarship and experiential activities, the author challenges both academics and academic developers to reject narrowly instrumental approaches to professional development; bring teachers and teaching into view, in contrast with misguided interpretations of student-centredness that tend to erase them from the picture; claim back literary writings as a source of wisdom and insight; trust readers' responses; and reintroduce beauty and joy into university teaching that has come to be perceived as bleak and unfulfilling. This book does not attempt to construct a single, coherent argument but rather to indicate a range of good things to choose from. Readers are encouraged to explore the overlaps and the gaps.

Updated with new research and insights, the second edition of this foundational guide to the how of differentiation provides the thoughtful strategies teachers need to create and maintain classrooms where each student is recognized and respected and every student thrives. One of the most powerful lessons a teacher must learn is that classroom management is not about control; it's about delivering the support and facilitating the routines that will make the classroom work for each student, and thus, set all students free to be successful learners. In Leading and Managing a Differentiated Classroom, Carol Ann Tomlinson and Marcia B. Imbeau explore the central priorities and mindsets of differentiation and provide practical guidelines for making effective student-centered, academically responsive instruction a reality. Their classroom management approach is based on three critical understandings: 1. When students are engaged, they have no motivation to misbehave. 2. When students understand that their teacher sees them as worthwhile people with significant potential, it opens doors to learning. 3. The classroom can't work for anybody until it works for everybody. Written for K-12 teachers and instructional leaders, this book is packed with strategies for structuring and pacing lessons, organizing learning spaces and materials, starting and stopping class with purpose, setting up and managing routines, and shifting gears if something isn't going well. It also gives teachers the guidance they need to help students, colleagues, and parents understand the goals of differentiated instruction and contribute to its success. Along with examples of recommended practice drawn from real-life classrooms at a variety of grade levels, you will find answers to frequently asked questions and specific advice for balancing content requirements and the needs of learners. You'll gain confidence as a leader for and in your differentiated classroom and be better prepared to teach in a way that's more efficient and rewarding for you and more effective for every student in your care.

It is not unusual for even seasoned educators to express some bewilderment about teaching in today's fast-paced, technological, outcome-oriented environment. The overwhelming quantity of media messages bombarding learners has led them to develop a significant level of scepticism towards any information that they receive, and the old methods of teaching no longer seem to be effective. An educator's guide to effective classroom management provides clear and concise discussions of classroom management aspects within a present-day South African context to give educators an opportunity to question and enhance their approach to teaching and reduce the bureaucracy of their classrooms. An educator's guide to effective classroom management provides valuable knowledge, practical ideas and advice on the development of a personal classroom management plan to suit individual styles of teaching and thus promote successful learning. It is student centred and interactive, including practical activities and mind maps for clarity as well as opportunities for self-assessment. Contents include the following: The millennial learner; Self-management for the educator; Classroom management tasks; Planning in the classroom; Leadership in the classroom; Laws and constitutional provisions regulating classroom management and administration, learner discipline and safety. An educator's guide to effective classroom management is aimed at pre-service education students as well as already practising educators who wish to improve their classroom practice.