The art of observing children is more than merely the act of watching them--it is also using what you see and hear to craft new opportunities in your classroom. This resource provides a wealth of inspiration and practice. It will help you learn to observe in new ways. You'll witness children's remarkable competencies as they experience childhood,…

The cultivation of reflective practice has become a commonly accepted goal of theological education. However, theological educators must face the challenge of teaching and assessing reflective practice. Hypothesizing that this concern is best addressed in community, the authors of this article devised a collaborative action-research project using…

This paper explores ways in which student-teachers in the Lifelong Learning sector are able to draw on fictionalised accounts of their own teaching practice experiences in order to gain a clearer understanding of their models and expectations of professionalism, and of how they, as individuals, locate their current position within the profession…

This article focuses on the theoretical frame of action research and the teacher as researcher, working through a Norwegian Research Council-funded project in a school that explored learning strategies for pupils' subject and social development. Action research is here called research and development (R&D) work as the term envisages that…

Every school district has policies and procedures for evaluating teachers that are shaped by state law and local collective bargaining agreements. As a result of No Child Left Behind and other accountability legislation many states modified requirements about the frequency of evaluation and now require the use of student achievement data as one…

In this article I recount my experiences with a series of encounters with the catwalk task and reflect on the professional growth that these opportunities afforded. First, I reflect on my own mathematical work on the catwalk task, including my efforts to fit various algebraic models to the data. Second, I reflect on my experiences working with a…

With the introduction of free primary education throughout Africa over the past 20 years, the demand for more qualified teachers has grown tremendously (Nilsson, 2003). Mainstream teacher education programs, typically consisting of 1-3 years of residence in teachers' colleges and some form of practice teaching, are unable to meet this…

Educational researchers have recently suggested that Schon's influential model of the "reflective practitioner" lacks a prospective, or future, dimension. In this study, we examine instances of future-oriented talk produced by novice English as-a-second-language (ESL) teachers during mentoring meetings in one North American university…

Decision-making in Reading Recovery requires skills of observation and reflective analysis that many teachers have not had to learn in order to be good classroom teachers. This is because Reading Recovery sets the teacher a very complex task which involves the construction of a curriculum for each individual child--a curriculum that is…

This article reports on the results of a mixed method case study investigating the relationship between professional learning community (PLC) activities and teacher improvement in a first-year middle school. Data were collected from core academic sixth, seventh, and eighth grade teachers using a professional development survey, teacher interviews,…

This paper draws upon research undertaken in nine higher education institutions for a doctoral thesis. The qualitative study used repertory grids and semi-structured interviews with nine course leaders to investigate models of professional development that underpin courses for new teachers in higher education. While evidence of good levels of…

Teacher preparation requires exemplary teaching that illustrates the systematic reflection encouraged among preservice teachers. This article provides an investigation of an innovative model for integrating action research into a preservice teacher education program. Through a self-study, one teacher educator presents reflections on action…

This article presents a professional development initiative developed by a university-school partnership based on the Japanese lesson-study model described by Stigler and Hiebert (1999) in "The Teaching Gap." Lesson study ("jugyoukenkyu"), an inquiry model of teacher professional development, is used extensively throughout…

The focus of this article is to describe a social organization of instruction and identify the conditions and contexts of critical classroom inquiry that are essential components of contemporary teacher education programs. Novice teachers must develop both the need to know and dispositions for knowing in order to move away from…

This text introduces the concepts of Continuous Quality Improvement (CQI) and shows how they can be used in the classroom. A quality classroom is defined as one in which everyone in the class knows the objectives of the class and adopts a quality philosophy to continuously improve the work done to meet those objectives. The general principles and…