The potential for professional development initiatives to improve quality in ECEC is an area of increasing international interest. This article presents insights from an ethnography into the manifestation of a two-year practice-based continuous professional development initiative (Educational Quality in Daycare: EQD) informed by the Abecedarian…

This dissertation investigates the impact of a pedagogical class and a Community of Practice (CoP) on the implementation of reading strategies by faculty at a community college. It explores the types of reading strategies instructors plan to use, their integration into classroom practices, the factors enabling or impeding this implementation, and…

This study examines teachers' perceptions of the specific factors and conditions which shape international communities of practice as successful vehicles for their professional development. Data were collected through semi-structured interviews with thirteen teachers in Poland who have extensive experience working in a wide range of international…

Teaching is a complex collection of creative actions with ongoing consequential choices and decisions; therefore, it necessitates educators' ongoing reflection. As educators who currently serve art teacher candidates at Kutztown University of Pennsylvania, a small public university in the rural Northeast, the authors constantly seek to rework…

Pedagogical metacognition, or the reflective and reflexive actions associated with teaching practice, strengthens the planning, monitoring, evaluation, and adjustment of teaching in higher education faculty. Learning communities are optimal environments to foster this active teaching reflection. This study incorporated pedagogical metacognition…

For more than a decade, the authors have engaged in several collaborative action research projects in established communities of practice, generating new knowledge and promoting practice development in religious education (RE) in schools and higher education. Based on this, this article asks what characterised the collaborative processes, and how…

Faculty book clubs are one way to engage in discussion and promote action with colleagues around topics that impact our classrooms. One of the many benefits of book clubs is that the format and process can be altered to fit the needs of the intended audience. This paper describes one faculty group's use of three different models of a book club…

Although writing is often used for personal reflection in teacher education, it is less commonly leveraged to imagine educational futures (Gilligan, 2020)--particularly those centered on collective liberation. Amid intersecting social crises, however, imagining futures is critically important (Ladson-Billings, 2021), and writing is a crucial step…

Drawing on the perspectives of six student teachers (including five geography specialists) and two teacher educators, four key components are identified as being crucial to enable those undertaking a geography-focused programme of Initial Teacher Education to thrive rather than simply survive. These include, (1) nurturing an enjoyment of…

Purpose: Whilst professional learning communities (PLCs) have been widely explored at the school level, they have received less attention at the departmental level. The study takes the variance between departments and the role of departmental teacher leaders into consideration, and the relationships amongst departmental-level PLC dimensions, two…

Despite a burgeoning body of research on teacher identity development, little is known about how incongruities between the ideal and real-life teaching practices create identity tensions. The present study adopted an arts-based approach and examined teachers' ideal and actual teaching practices, and the associated identity tensions and related…

Professional Learning Communities (PLCs) are valuable spaces for collaboration and reflection to promote the transformation of teaching practice and resilience to change. In PLCs that are sustained over time, trust-building is a key element. In Latin America, school systems and educational models are based on mistrust, which in Chile is consistent…

This article discusses the meanings of mathematics teaching forged in the reflections promoted in a lesson study. Guided by the question "What meanings of teaching in mathematics are constructed from reflections promoted in a lesson study?" and based on Isabel Alarcão's (2018) concept of teaching, we examined four editions of a lesson…

Teachers' professional development is an important factor to improve the quality of teaching in colleges and universities. At present, teachers' professional development in colleges and universities mainly focuses on teacher training and consultation, lacking personalized attention to teachers' professional development. With the development of…

This article describes a reflective process, influenced by collaborative autoethnography and poetic inquiry, and provides an opportunity for replication at other sites. The process illuminated a workgroup's power to enhance professional lives in support of students, seeking to harness collective power to make space for critical discussions as well…