The Improvement Network Health and Development Framework (INHD Framework) sets a vision for a complex new organizational form for practical problem solving: the Networked Improvement Community (NIC). One critical test of this idealized framework is to explore its usefulness in describing variation in these deliberatively formed, temporary…

Effective collective learning demands that educators be fully present and actively engaged--both mentally and physically--during professional learning community (PLC) meetings. When teams build norms that explicitly support a culture of presence, honesty, and continuous reflection, they create an environment where every educator can contribute…

Background: The Needs Assessment Framework (NAF) stimulates awareness of care staff to consider perspectives of clients with intellectual disabilities in decisions on involuntary care. We explored the effect of implementers' participation in a Virtual Community-of-Practice (VCoP) for designing implementation plans, on NAF implementation and staff…

The geoscience education research (GER) community has evolved and grown over the past several decades. Using Wenger et al.'s Community of Practice (CoP) model (2002), we discuss how the GER CoP (which is broader than the formal discipline of GER) has changed, highlighting noteworthy events and growth points. Trends in community membership and…

This study examines how monks (bhakats) at Hindu monasteries (satra) in Assam become legitimate members of their monastic community. Rooted within the Neo-Vaishnavite tradition of the fifteenth century, satras were established to foster an egalitarian society and became vital spiritual and cultural institutions where religious teachings were…

The pandemic represented a context where rapid changes to planning, organization and service delivery were undertaken to respond to an urgent and life-threatening health system problem. There was intense interest in knowledge mobilization--mechanisms that allow the timely sharing of evidence with the aim of supporting improvement--to mitigate the…

Critical thinking is often nominated as a graduate attribute, a learning outcome, and is even offered as a discrete subject in schools and universities. Therefore, it is important to gain clarity about the fundamental goal or purpose of critical thinking education. What should instructors be aiming at when they seek to instil critical thinking in…

Background: Social media provides new opportunities for teachers to learn, communicate and develop professional relationships. It has been proved to be a valid and helpful resource for teachers' professional learning purposes. Objectives: While previous studies pursued questions like how participants feel, how to support interaction and why…

Writing workshop, as conceived by Donald Graves and other US researchers in the 1980s, positively transformed the writing instruction of many teachers. However, others experienced considerable challenges as they tried to create workshop classrooms. This article examines the three historical conditions that defined workshop: (1) choice, (2) time…

Prior research on the "Community of Inquiry" (CoI) framework has a limited amount of work which uses structural techniques to confirm the factorial structure of the CoI. The current study investigates the structural relationships among the three elements of the CoI framework (cognitive presence, teaching presence, and social presence),…

This explanatory correlational study examined nuanced relationships between teacher collaboration and teacher job satisfaction in two school districts in Illinois. A total of N=231 K-12 teachers responded to established measures of teacher job satisfaction and teacher collaboration from the 2018 Teaching and Learning International Survey (TALIS).…

In 1998, the University of Wisconsin-Madison began offering opportunities for staff, faculty, and students to engage in reflection of their lived experiences in learning communities. In 2012, the Learning Communities for Institutional Change & Excellence (LCICE) unit formally launched, providing dialogue- and cohort-based professional learning…

Ten school-based leaders engaged in an experimental professional learning community to understand when, during their daily practice, they placed learning (as an action) at the forefront of their leadership. This article presents the findings from the first phase (discovery) of a four-phase, two-year appreciative inquiry study. At their schools,…

As former principals who led turnaround schools and now as coaches who work with school leaders and their teams, the authors know that there are many challenges all school leaders face. The authors have found there is one consistent factor that separates schools that successfully respond to challenges from the rest: the collective understanding…

Like other papers in this symposium, this essay approaches the question of responsible belief through the lens of social epistemology: what are the processes by which knowledge claims, evidence, perspectives, and arguments get shared within knowledge-making communities? In this paper, Nicholas Burbules argues that these processes are essentially…