Coaches play integral roles in many schools' learning cultures, but they often find their entry into coaching life disorienting and difficult. Educators typically take on the mantle of coach because they were successful as teachers, and they may have limited experiences working with adult learners. For new coaches, having access to the support and…

Lesson study has been implemented as a viable approach to support teachers' professional development. Yet, this approach has not been thoroughly examined in relation to key micro-political power relations that are arguably endemic to the use of this collaborative learning model. Accordingly, this paper discusses post-structural concepts that might…

In this account of practice I would like to share my experiences of facilitating a Critical Reflection Action Learning (CRAL) set with a small family run business, struggling to make change and expand their services due to the problems they encountered in separating their business lives from their family lives. The account I present here is based…

Leadership matters. Principals are the primary drivers of school improvement and the best long-term investment to ensure effective teaching and learning at scale. Principals are central to State efforts to implement new college and career-ready standards, execute teacher evaluation and support systems and turn around low-performing schools. These…

Academic developers are often positioned as intermediaries who wield value-neutral tools--languages, models, and techniques--in service of decidedly non-neutral institutional goals. We challenge the value of perpetuating the ideal of the neutrality of academic developers and their tools by examining the ways in which our resources and approaches…

Through a feminist approach this paper illustrates how humour is used as a resource and strategy for status among Finnish school boys and in constructing culturally accepted masculinity in the field of informal school. Based on interview and observation material collected in three schools, the results suggest that although humour is often…

This article presents a model for democratic pedagogy in science classrooms that is based on an examination of existing literature on democratic educational practices and on teacher and student ideas about how this pedagogy can take shape and be operationalized in science classrooms. A goal of democratic science pedagogy is to explore ways of…

Based on years of observation at a large state university, "Wannabe U" tracks the dispiriting consequences of trading in traditional educational values for loyalty to the market. Aping their boardroom idols, the new corporate administrators at such universities wander from job to job and reductively view the students there as future workers in…

Educational researchers are accustomed to institutional review board (IRB) requirements (e.g., protecting participants) with students often identified as the only "vulnerable population" for IRB purposes. However, as practitioner research has gained more prominence, the vulnerability of teacher-researchers themselves has begun to…

Uses the metaphor of "performance" from an interpretive perspective as a guide to understanding the nature of managerial communication. Develops three managerial processes of "rationality,""sociability," and "authority" and illustrates these processes with observational data from a field study of managerial…