Published Under the Garamond Imprint The voices in this book reflect the broad diversity of a large urban university community, with contributions from undergraduate and graduate students, teaching assistants, contract and full-time faculty, staff and administrators. Issues of equity, diversity and power form the foundation of this community's thinking about pedagogy, and the topics span a continuum from the theoretical to the practical. Voices from the Classroom will have a broad appeal to the university teaching community across North America, facing common challenges in the twenty-first century.

There is much attention currently being given to argument-based inquiry in national and state curriculum documents. Students are being required to be able to generate and evaluate science knowledge, and to think critically and judge the value of evidence and explanations. The intent of the book is to provide a rich and broad view of the impact of argument-based inquiry in the elementary classrooms from the perspective of the teacher. All the teachers and professional development authors were engaged in promoting and using argument based inquiry as the approach to teaching science. They were implementing the Science Writing Heuristic (SWH) approach as the argument based approach for classroom practice. As researchers we constantly work to present our views of these experiences with the voice of the teachers only being relayed through the perspective of the researcher. The intent of this book is to provide an opportunity for us as a community to listen to what the teachers are telling us. Importantly as demands are being placed on classroom experiences that provide opportunities for students to pose questions, make claims, and provide evidence, that is, to think critically and reason like scientists, we need to understand what this looks like from the perspective of the teacher. This book brings together a range of elementary teachers from kindergarten through to year 6 who have used the Science Writing Heuristic approach to teach argument-based inquiry. These teachers have all gone through professional development programs and successfully implemented the approach at a high level.

Voices from the Classroom illustrates that teachers have a leading voice in the policies that impact their students and the profession of teaching. The aim is to provide a rich and broad view of the impact of inquiry in the classrooms, from primary to higher education, and to provide a window into the perspective of teachers. Voices from the Classroom allows us to advance this mission by identifying and then turning educators' ideas into action. The publication includes chapters on issues ranging from dyslexic students' geospatial abilities to teachers' differential behaviours related, student characteristics and the experiences of refugees with bullying in the educational space. All the contributions published in this book emerged from real classrooms: our teachers and researchers conducted their research by drawing on their experience as educators. We believe that these insights into everyday classrooms, and the issues affecting them, are crucial to making teaching and learning better. We hope they can help drive real, positive change for students and teachers.

The intent of this book is to provide a rich and broad view of the impact of argument-based inquiry in classrooms from the perspective of the teacher. There are two important reasons for such a book. The first is that we as researchers constantly work to present our views of these experiences with the voice of the teachers only being relayed through the perspective of the researcher. We need as a community to listen to what the teachers are telling us. The second reason is that as demands grow to provide opportunities for students to pose questions, make claims, and provide evidence, that is, to think critically and reason like scientists, we need to understand what this looks like from the perspective of the teacher. This book brings together a range of teachers from several countries who have used the Science Writing Heuristic (SWH) approach to teach argument-based inquiry. These teachers have all gone through professional development programs and successfully implemented the approach at a high level.

This book addresses the all-important dimensions of collaboration in the study of learning raised by such questions as: Should teachers engage students directly in discussions and inquiry about learning? To what extent? What is gained by the collaboration? Does it improve learning, and what do shared responsibilities mean for classroom dynamics, and beyond?Practicing what it advocates, a faculty-student team co-edited this book, and faculty-student (or former student) teams co-authored eight of its eleven chapters. The opening section of this book explores such dimensions of student voices in the scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL) as power and authority in the classroom, collaborative meaning-making, and the role of students as both learners and experts on their own learning. It opens up the process of knowledge-building to a wider group of participants, and expands our conception of who has expertise to contribute – for instance recognizing students’ “insider” knowledge of themselves as learners. Using various institutional models to illustrate these foundational concepts, part one provides a context for understanding the detailed examples that follow. The case studies in the second half of the volume illustrate how these concepts play out inside and outside the classroom when students shift from serving as research subjects in a SoTL study to working as independent researchers or as partners with faculty in such work as studying curricular design/redesign, readings, requirements, and assessment. This co-inquiry brings the principles and benefits of the broader undergraduate research movement to the topic of teaching and learning. It also increases student researchers’ sense of themselves as independent learners. While recognizing the impossibility of engaging every student in the scholarship of teaching and learning in every course, the editors and contributors make the case for making such opportunities available as broadly as possible because, as this volume also makes clear, this is transformational work – with the potential to produce paradigm shifts, turning points, new insights, and changes in classroom culture – for both faculty and students. The contributors demonstrate how they validated student voices in theory, method, and methodology across a wide variety of disciplines and while engaging with different pedagogies. Disciplinary examples include: anthropology, communication, chemistry, criminal science, education, English, geography, history, human services, mathematics, psychology, sociology, theater arts, philosophy, and political science.

First published in 1997. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

As a teacher, you are required to use your voice more than any other professional! Your voice is the most important tool that you have at your disposal to inspire students and help them learn effectively. Using your voice powerfully and effectively is the key to becoming an outstanding teacher. Developing a strong vocal presence in the classroom influences everything else that you do, helping to build your confidence and positive interactions with students. If you neglect your voice as a teacher, you are more likely to end up stressed, have a shorter teaching career and suffer from vocal health issues. This book explores how you can learn to use your voice effectively in the classroom, linking together basic theory about vocal production and teacher identity with numerous practical tips, tricks and exercises which you can apply to your own teaching. Covering all aspects of the voice and its employment both inside the classroom and its importance to daily life outside, the book tackles topics such as: the philosophy of the voice, how it develops and its role in creating your own identity the mechanical and mental skills required to develop a teaching voice acquiring confidence and an exploration of body language to underpin your vocal production the relationship between the student’s voice and the teacher’s voice the importance of practice for a teacher the practicality of caring for one’s voice. Using Your Voice Effectively in the Classroom offers a much-needed exploration and thorough examination of the voice in the classroom and will be an indispensable guide for trainee teachers, as well as valuable reading for all practising teachers.

This book uses a structure that can be best described as half textbook, half novel. Presenting language arts information in a straightforward, yet engaging manner, it reflects realistically the state of today's classrooms.

The issue of teacher quality is increasingly seen as being central to education policy development and this emphasis highlights the role teacher professional development plays in improving teacher effectiveness and the quality of learning in the classroom. This book describes a large-scale research program which investigated the feasibility of using student perceptual measures as the basis for teacher development and classroom improvement. The book describes how teachers’ use of the student feedback, as part of an action-research process, was used to guide improvements to their respective classrooms which in turn provided them with increased opportunities for teacher development and growth. In addition to this, it reports the efforts of one school which purposefully linked the involvement of their teachers to their school improvement initiatives. This book would be of interest to a range of audiences including researchers, teachers and school leaders. Its attractions include its far-reaching implications for educational systems concerning the ways in which student feedback can be used to facilitate teacher development and growth. The book also reports the use of a multi-method research design in which quantitative and qualitative methods were successfully employed simultaneously within two concurrent and interrelated investigations.