Surveys covering mathematical knowledge for teaching and teachers’ professional learning opportunities were administered to 461 middle school mathematics teachers in both 2005 and 2006. Results indicate that that teachers’ mathematical knowledge might have improved during this time period, and improvements may be linked to specific forms of professional learning. However, teacher-learning opportunities appear short and fragmented.

This article argues that the emphasis on teaching history as a separate subject is of recent origin and is misguided for both cognitive and philosophical reasons. Rather than emphasizing the uniqueness of history, advocates of improved history education would be better served by recognizing the natural and long-standing place of history within the broader field of social studies.

Using a qualitative methodology, this study examines the relationship between a professional development effort centered on teaching history through a cultural encounters approach, and the history teaching practice of 21 teachers. Findings demonstrate that the participants’ conceptual frameworks toward history, grounded in their own professional knowledge and teaching expertise, were important factors in how they reconceptualized their views of curriculum.

This ethnographic study explores the role that implicit and explicit questions played in encouraging mathematical thinking in a diverse elementary mathematics class taught by a reform-oriented teacher in an urban school.

This article explores the intersection of teacher learning and collegial interactions, reporting findings from a highly collaborative, improvement-oriented high school mathematics department. The author identifies discourse structures important to the representation and exploration of problems of practice.

This article focuses on explicit arts-based approaches that the authors employed in a 3-year teacher education study of professional conflicts experienced by novice bilingual teachers. The authors describe how they used the literary and performing arts and to what end, addressing questions regarding processes, expertise, and validity in arts-based research.

This research examines the relationship between mathematics and science coursework patterns among high school graduates using data from the 2000 High School Transcript Study.

The article looks at the variety of practices that different societies (Britain, Quebec, Ontario, the United States, and Belgium) have adopted to foster the mastery of the host language by immigrant students, with a special focus on the degree to which such endeavors follow an immersion or a specific services formula and on the role they grant to heritage languages.

This article addresses the growing diversity in religious and ethnic backgrounds among students at primary and secondary schools in Western Europe. Presented are the outcomes of international comparative anthropological (qualitative) research on multiculturalism, citizenship, and nation building in schools in Paris, Berlin, London, and Rotterdam.

This article illustrates how events, issues, movements, and social conditions external to schooling appear to enter in and influence classroom curriculum practice.

This inquiry raises questions about the manner in which the No Child Left Behind Act aims to improve mathematics education through continued reliance on standardized testing and mandated use of scientifically based teaching practices. Specifically, it is argued that this approach is tied to assumptions about intellectual ability and achievement that precipitated the dividing practices used to justify differential access to mathematics learning almost a century ago. An examination of so-called objective and scientific approaches to school mathematics suggests the need for more earnest reflection about the particular path toward educational progress privileged by this legislation.

This study examines the instructional practices observed in honors and non-honors French and Spanish classes at a Midwestern high school, as well as those factors reported by the teachers at that school as influencing those practices. Analysis revealed a statistically significant relationship between type of class and type of activity, with honors classes having more communicative activities. Teachers attributed differences to student expectations for the two levels, students’ level of motivation for language study, and their maturity level. Results generally mirrored those of previous studies that examined the use of tracking students by ability level in secondary school classrooms. Language educators are urged to reconsider differentiation of curriculum according to students' ability level for the profession's future viability.

Rabbi Raymond Zwerin and Audrey Friedman Marcus published the Gestapo Holocaust simulation game in 1976. Since that time it has been a source of debate among Jewish intellectuals and other scholars concerned with the pedagogy of the Holocaust. Even the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum has weighed in on the issue, taking a clear position against Holocaust simulations of any kind. In this essay, the author informs this debate through a historical study of the origins of the Gestapo simulation game.

In this article on the literate development of individuals with significant disabilities, the authors describe local understanding as a relationship in which the value, intelligence, and literate presence of the person with disabilities is presumed and responsive contexts are developed that foster literate growth. Implications for policy and students without disabilities are highlighted.

This article examines social studies curriculum and instruction in two teachers' classrooms at an elementary school where instructional time for social studies was reduced in response to state testing in language arts and mathematics. Findings suggest that the institution of an accountability system meant to improve teaching and learning is instead undermining teachers' efforts to enact a thoughtful social studies curriculum in their classrooms.

This essay tells the forgotten story of the founding of essentialism. After a brief biographical description of the career of William Bagley, the paper describes in detail how essentialism came to be and why it matters. Then, the work connects the principles of essentialism to contemporary debates in teaching, teacher education, and curriculum.

Measuring the social relationships between Israeli Jewish and Arab students at the onset of contact intervention programs revealed that although the relationships between the groups are negatively based, they are neither stable nor monolithic. As a result, secondary rather than primary intervention strategies for peace intervention programs are suggested.

An article about learning at an informal venue: Richard Hugo House, a nonprofit center for creative writing in Seattle. The article traces the characteristics of teaching and learning in a place not segregated by age, skill level, or economic background of the people who come there.

This article examines a community-based arts classroom that represents alternative practices and relationships than are typical in most schools to understand more about the possibilities of learning and identity for disenfranchised students. The study draws on long-term engagement, participant observation, and discourse analysis to highlight the resources made available to students as well as changing patterns of student participation in workshop activities.

This article examines the centrality of cultural artifacts, or cultural resources, in the social process of “doing” or “performing” literacy.

This article investigates the effects of nonhierarchical curriculum differentiation on gender and socioeconomic inequality in course taking and in achievement in Israeli secondary education.

The findings from a base-year data collection of a multiyear case study of a recently chartered college preparatory high school show how logistical constraints and staff turnover affected the implementation of the school’s mission, which is to prepare educationally and socially disadvantaged students for college.

This article systematically examines how one teacher rhetorically positions herself and her student audience through narrative performances during a literacy unit about the Holocaust in a middle school classroom.

The article describes results of a qualitative study of an elementary school as it enacted a variety of strategies to help students raise scores on a newly required state test designed to serve as an accountability tool.

This examination of student characteristics and instructional effectiveness in one matched pair of educational psychology classes found that, initially, students in the intensive version of the course performed significantly better than students in the semester-length course on posttests of content and questions tapping higher-order learning.

Introduced by a personal anecdote dealing with the perils of excessive specialization, this essay rails against the problems arising from the isolation of many educational professionals during an era of heightened educational accountability. Antidotes to such specialization are proposed.

This ethnographic account focusing on ceremonial events in integrated Palestinian-Jewish schools in Israel questions the potential of multicultural education to support coexistence between conflicting groups.

A National Conference at Teachers College

This article constitutes a critique from the inside of constructivist pedagogy.

This article attempts to clarify service-learning practice and theory by offering four distinct conceptualizations of service learning: technical, cultural, political, and poststructuralist.