Academic writing is a social practice in which the writer interacts with both texts and people and uses the interaction as a learning resource. While academic interaction in the classroom setting has been extensively investigated, student interaction that takes place without teacher supervision remains largely unexplored. Since autonomy is a key…

Purpose: The study aims to examine the issues relating to workplace learning at the upper secondary school level. This study is based on the two questions. How should the professional/peer-learning community or PLC be developed and deployed to help strengthen in-service teacher training? The second question is what are the success factors which…

Purpose: The purpose of this article is to outline the evidence-based development of a learning approach to school renewal that employs information from key members of a school community (teachers, parents, students) to promote school-based discussions about school renewal. Setting: The study took place in an independent system of Catholic…

Literature on the support of the First Year Experience (FYE) in institutions of Higher Education provides a range of modelled approaches. However, we argue that institutions still need to selectively plan which approach/es and attendant strategies are best suited to their particular contexts and institutional policy and practice frameworks and how…

The purpose of this research was to conduct a feasibility study for the establishment of a Micronesian culture-based charter school or other educational program in the state of Hawai'i. Community partners representing four organizations came together with this common goal. There are a growing number of Micronesian families living abroad,…

This study investigates how sustained professional learning for teachers within a centralised system was cultivated. Specifically, the sustained professional learning was initiated by officers from the headquarters (HQ) and involved interested teachers across schools in Singapore. Qualitative instruments were used to collect and analyse the data…

This paper reports findings from a 2-year study of online coursework in a graduate certificate program in qualitative research methods in the USA. Thirty-four interviews with students enrolled in coursework offered over a 2-year period were analyzed to explore their perceptions of engagement with the course content and one another. Findings are…

Background: Focusing on ways a common endeavor brings people together, Gee offered the concept of affinity spaces, which suggests that open participation without exclusion or membership is possible. This theory contrasts with Lave and Wenger's communities of practice, which called attention to situated, hierarchical participatory practices.…

Attrition among new teachers with fewer than 5 years of experience was high in an urban high school in Texas. The high attrition rate is a problem for students, because high teacher turnover can result in teachers with low expertise. In this study, the conceptual framework used was Hord's professional learning community (PLC) model, which…

This study reports the findings of a qualitative case study that examined how elements of design and organization were conceptualized and enacted in two graduate level online courses, and, how these conceptualizations and enactments evolved. Data was collected through interviews and "think-alouds" with the course instructors and through…

A growing number of schools are implementing PLCs to address school improvement, staff engage with data to identify student needs and determine instructional interventions. This is a starting point for engaging in the iterative process of learning for the teach in order to increase student learning (Hord & Sommers, 2008). The iterative process…

This article examines the extent to which Access to Higher Education courses can be defined as communities of practice. Other studies have already revealed the importance of mutual engagement and supportive relationships between students and between students and tutors in facilitating learning. While previous studies carried out on Access to HE…

Based in a time of major curriculum reform, this article reports on a qualitative case study of teacher professional development (PD) in the Republic of Ireland (ROI). Five mathematics teachers in an Irish secondary school were introduced to and participated in successive cycles of school-based lesson study (LS) over the course of one academic…

The Professional Doctorate has become an increasingly popular doctoral route. Research has tended to focus on outcomes and "impact" or on the epistemological nature of programmes and resulting student identities compared to other routes. This paper takes a different focus, examining the "process" through which students come to…

In 2007 the Cancer Care Ontario Hepatobiliary-Pancreatic (HPB) Community of Practice was formed during the wake of provincial regionalization of HPB services in Ontario, Canada. Despite being conceptualized within the literature as an educational intervention, communities of practice (CoP) are increasingly being adopted in healthcare as quality…