The processes for choosing, preparing, and supporting facilitators for faculty learning communities are as unique as the campuses housing them. This chapter reports on a range of activities and highlights three preparation programs. The following are appended: (1) Goals Inventory for Faculty Learning Community; and (2) Planning Inventory for…

Argues for a viable discourse community of the social studies profession. Suggests that such a professional conversation is characterized by an engaging and authentic topic and skilled conversationalists of equal status. Recommends that the first questions to be addressed deal with the nature of value, reality, and knowledge. (DK)

Using a post-structural, interpretive perspective, we studied children's humour in a grade-1 and -2 classroom. In this article, we report our observations of two boys who took on the role of "class clown." The boys used humour to negotiate power, which we defined as participation in discourse, taking on the role of class clowns and…

Learning communities can emerge spontaneously when people find common learning goals and pursue projects and tasks together in pursuit of those goals. "Bounded" learning communities (BLCs) are groups that form within a structured teaching or training setting, typically a course. Unlike spontaneous communities, BLCs develop in direct response to…

A group of teacher educators adopted collaborative teamwork to cope with a too large teaching load. The authors reflect on the experience of working together in a critical friendship group, highlighting the role that conversation plays in this process. The experience of a collaborative approach and its impact on teaching and professional…

Based on the premise that portfolios form part of a process to enable the teacher more truly to become a facilitator, this report presents the narratives of an 8th-grade reading workshop teacher and a 12th-grade honors course teacher. The report begins with a brief section explaining the principles of the project. The format of the report is a…

Teacher education programs around the nation continue to be challenged to prepare prospective teachers to use technology "meaningfully" in their instruction. This implies that university faculty in teacher education programs must become proficient at technology use and must come to understand content-specific, pedagogical uses of technology for…

A team of faculty and students from a principal preparation program sought to discover how administrators and teachers in two culturally diverse middle schools were implementing the concept of learning community. The purposes of the study was to: (1) Explore how administrators and teachers defined learning communities; (2) Determine how the two…

Some learning scientists are beginning to investigate social and cultural aspects of learning by examining the interactions between a learner and the environment as well as with other people in the learning environment. This article proposes conversational analysis (CA) as a tool to analyze interactions between learners and instructors in…

"Questioning the Author" is a particular style of classroom discussion that tries to get young students (fourth and fifth graders) to actively grapple with the ideas they read about in class. It may be distinguished from other reading strategies by the following approaches: (1) it addresses a text as the product of a fallible author; (2)…

This guide provides moderators with a sense of what deliberation means, their roles, the dialogue format, and principles and skills they need to keep in mind as they interact with the participants. The purpose of a deliberative dialogue is to bring community members together to discuss a relevant and important issue. The question addressed in this…

The language of a literate classroom is profoundly impacted by that which is included, excluded, ignorantly condoned, and perpetually presented with distortions. The article analyzes seven comprehensive frameworks: (1) diverse voices; (2) identities of the language users; (3) present and absent curriculum; (4) cognitive structures influencing…

Providing high-quality student services to students enrolled in distance education programs is a critical link to the academic success of this growing student population. (Contains 7 figures.)

Many online classes use synchronous communication--chat--as a way to conduct class discussion. However, chat can quickly disintegrate into nonproductive chaos if allowed to flow unchecked. The tools provided by course management systems such as Blackboard provide one solution to this problem by allowing instructors to grant or deny access to…

This article elaborates a model for understanding pedagogy in online educational forums. The model identifies four key components. Intellectual engagement describes the foreground cognitive processes of collaborative learning. Communication processes operating in the background accumulate an ever richer store of shared understandings that enable…