Learning Together

Across Canada, teachers unfamiliar with Aboriginal approaches to learning are seeking ways to respectfully weave Aboriginal content into their lessons. This book introduces an indigenist approach to education. It recounts how pre-service teachers immersed in a crosscultural course in British Columbia began to practise Indigenous ways of knowing. Working alongside Indigenous wisdom keepers, they transformed earth fibres into a mural and, in the process, their own ideas about learning and teaching. By revealing how they worked to integrate Indigenous ways of knowing into their practice, this book opens a path for teachers to nurture indigenist crosscultural understanding in their classrooms.

Many curriculum books treat teaching as something teachers do to or for children. Deb Curtis and Margie Carter, best-selling authors in the early learning field, believe teaching is a collaborative process in which teachers reexamine their own philosophies and practices while facilitating children’s learning. Each chapter in this curriculum framework includes a conceptual overview followed by classroom stories and photographs to illustrate the concepts. The book helps teachers create materials and a classroom culture reflective of their values: Teach through observation, reflection, inquiry, and action, and encourage children to represent their learning in multiple ways, including songs, stories, and drama.

Now available in paperback, this award-winning book provides a comprehensive history of gender policies and practices in American public schools. David Tyack and Elisabeth Hansot explore the many factors that have shaped coeducation since its origins. At the very time that Americans were creating separate spheres for adult men and women, they institutionalized an education system that brought boys and girls together. How did beliefs about the similarities and differences of boys and girls shape policy and practice in schools? To what degree did the treatment of boys and girls differ by class, race, region, and historical period? Debates over gender policies suggest that American have made public education the repository of their hopes and anxieties about relationships between the sexes. Thus, the history of coeducation serves as a window not only on constancy and change in gender practices in the schools but also on cultural conflicts about gender in the broader society. "Learning Together presents a rich and exhaustive search through [the] 'tangled history' of gender and education that links both the silences and the debates surrounding coeducation to the changing roles of women and men in our society....It is the generosity and capaciousness of Tyack and Hansot's scholarship that makes Learning Together so important a book." —Science

This book is about the past and future of research on the effectiveness of learning networks (also known as "e-learning" or "online learning" or "Web-based learning"). Learning networks are groups of people using computer technology, communicating and collaborating online to build knowledge together. Over the past decade there has been an explosion not only of online courses, but also of studies on them. In Learning Together Online: Research on Asynchronous Learning Networks, leading researchers in the field use an integrated theoretical framework, which they call "Online Interaction Learning Theory," to organize what past research shows and where future research is going. It models the variables and processes that are important in determining the relative effectiveness of online learners working to reach a deeper level of understanding by interacting with each other and with the texts under investigation. Now that there have been hundreds of studies and thousands of courses offered online, what does the empirical evidence show? This book addresses the question directly by presenting what is known from research results about how to design and teach courses effectively online, ranging from the organizational context and characteristics of students to learning theories and research design methods. It also provides a research agenda for the next decade. Learning Together Online: Research on Asynchronous Learning Networks is both a textbook for graduate students and a professional reference for faculty teaching online, researchers conducting studies, and graduate students taking courses about learning technologies who need to know the state of the art of research in the area of online learning.

Increasingly the education world is recognizing that the development of learning communities is an effective means for improving schools without increasing the budget or adding new programs. This indispensible volume offers practical advice gathered from 22 schools (elementary, middle, and high schools) that have successfully modeled or are creating professional learning communities.

Learning Together consists of sequential unison repertoire for string instruments of the orchestra and is intended for use in string classes, group ensembles, and private lesson settings. Harmony parts and bass lines complete the arrangements and are composed so that any mixed string ensemble, as well as ensembles of like instruments, can perform the pieces. Piano accompaniments are included and can be added to any of these combinations. Performance possibilities include individual solo or unison groups, class ensembles, and district or festival sized orchestras. The Learning Together repertoire can be used to establish solo technique, introduce ensemble skills, develop aural skills, and can serve as a foundation for learning to read music. Each instrument book comes with a CD that includes solo performances, string ensemble performances, and piano accompaniment tracks of the featured repertoire. The authors of Learning Together are award-winning teachers with over 100 years of combined recognized success. They share extensive experience as performers, conductors, clinicians, and studio and classroom teachers. This book demonstrates their commitment to providing rich musical experiences for all students in classroom and studio settings.

The number of students in higher education has expanded dramatically in recent years, but funding has not kept pace with this growth. The result is less contact time for lecturers and their students, and corresponding worries about how the quality of teaching and learning can be improved. Peer tutoring is one method which is growing in popularity, and has already proved successful in a number of countries. This book provides an introduction to the methods and practice of peer tutoring focusing on how to set up schemes and how to cope with common problems. It discusses the theory behind this form of learning and the beneficial effects associated with it. Summaries are included at the end of each chapter.

'Affective Learning Together' contains in-depth theoretical reviews and case studies in the classroom, of the social and affective dimensions of group learning in a variety of educational situations and taught disciplines, from small groups working on design projects or debating topics in biology and in history in schools.