Schools have long been identified as important sites in terms of instilling values within the next generation. In order to develop our understanding of values, this paper sets out to explore how values are understood in Irish educational legislation, policies and curriculum. Irish Legislation, policies and curricula were searched systematically.…

The Teacher Rotation Policy (TRP) is a recent teacher policy developed in the context of China. TRP seeks to close China's teacher quality disparities through rotating 'high-quality' urban schoolteachers to teach in hard-to-staff rural schools for a period of time. This qualitative case study examined how five policy actors carried out TRP in one…

Standards-based reform is a trend affecting the educational systems of nations around the world, driven by desires to create educational systems suited to increasing economic productivity. In the USA, The No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act of 2001 includes goals of reducing achievement gaps and getting "highly qualified" teachers in all…

This paper reports on the work of a teacher-researcher collaborative group in the UK, who explored the idea of 'a dialogic approach' to classroom interaction and examined its relationship to use of the interactive whiteboard (IWB) in orchestrating classroom talk. We focus on how the co-inquiry process within this group led to the articulation of…

Whilst much research on teachers' lives has focussed on their early years in the profession, much less attention has been paid to those in their later years, so called "veteran" teachers. Yet, many of these are likely to hold positions of responsibility in the school, receive greater remuneration and have experienced the impact of more…

There is now unprecedented emphasis on teacher quality in the USA and in many nations around the world with extremely high expectations for teacher performance. Based on the assumption that education and the economy are inextricably linked, it is now assumed that teachers can--and should--teach all students to world-class standards, serve as the…

This paper focuses on the Teachers Network Leadership Institute (TNLI), an initiative designed to bring the voice of teachers into the educational policy arena through teacher action research. We view teachers' research on teaching and on school processes as an important means through which to expose the various sources of tension between policy…

New teachers are unprepared for school politics and the conflicts they experience with administrators, colleagues and policies. Research and practice on mentoring often ignore organizational contexts. This article explores these under-examined contexts, asking: (1) What do mentors need to know and be able to do in relation to school and district…

The purpose of the study reported upon in this paper was to determine what graduates of a teacher education program designed to prepare teachers who will work toward goals of equity and social justice were encountering in their schools and how they felt they were doing with regard to these aims and why. Eleven graduates in their second, fourth or…