This article describes a student-led assessment of a writing showcase event sponsored by a composition learning community at an urban R1 university. Participants conducted student-to-student interviews at the semi-annual writing showcase event to help assess whether and how the learning community event supported learning outcomes. The interviews,…

Teachers spend a lot of time talking about students: They talk about how students learn, how to best plan lessons for them, and how to understand their written work using different protocols. Instead of hypothesizing about what a student might do on a task or why a student made a certain mistake, why aren't teachers just asking the student?…

The discourse-based interview (DBI) allows researchers to explore writers' tacit knowledge. This article describes how we taught and learned to adapt a DBI-based interviewing process through the reflections of both the professor and two graduate students in a graduate-level course, Field Methods in Technical Communication. By participating in a…

The aim of this study was to explore challenging encounters experienced by registered nurses (RN) during their first year in the emergency medical service by using the social learning theory of communities of practice. During the first year in a new professional practice, a new RN experiences a transition during which the new professional identity…

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…

This phenomenological case study examined the link between teacher practice within the classroom and a newly implemented middle school social studies Professional Learning Community (PLC). More specifically, the use of mandates, theories, and activities were investigated through a series of teacher interviews, classroom observations,…

There is growing interest, worldwide, in collaboration between schools and community organisations in contributing to and enriching school science programs, yet such collaborations are inadequately understood. This paper reports data from an Australian study designed to probe the views of members of the community who have participated in a broad…

This article seeks to extend current understandings of educational action research, particularly how teachers' actions, talk and ongoing relatings can serve as a vehicle for transforming their learning, including under current global conditions of more performative accountability. The research is grounded in Noffke's (2009) understandings of the…

This research draws on the concepts of practice architecture, middle leader and scholarship and uses narrative analysis drawn from a 'community of practice' of HE in FE practitioners. Whilst being an existing 'community of practice', the university concerned changed the collaborative framework of support and this provided a platform for the…

Professional learning communities can be effective vehicles for teacher learning and instructional improvement, partly because they help change professional culture. However, little is known about "how" these changes occur. We used activity systems analysis to investigate the development of professional learning communities and their…

This article presents an interview with Kulvarn Atwal, headteacher at a primary school in London. Mr. Atwal discusses the challenges of post-graduate study and the impact of his studies on his professional practice. He explains how he discovered workplace learning theories and communities of practice during his studies and how he incorporated…

Involvement of children in research processes requires various ethical considerations. In particular, while interviewing children, a researcher needs to take into consideration the power imbalance between a researcher and children as well as among children. This article suggests a possible way of mitigating potential risks, drawing on the idea and…

This project focuses on the design and implementation of an online professional development platform tailored to teachers' needs to improve and promote their intercultural knowledge. Drawing upon the framework of virtual communities of practice, the project escapes from traditional professional development programmes. Although a total of 103…

This study explored the almost 20-year-old Community of Inquiry (CoI) social presence construct through faculty's perspectives and practices of their online teaching. Social presence has many CoI-identified characteristics, but overall it is the ability of a student to project their persona into the classroom. The preponderance of investigation…

Journal clubs are meetings where participants engage in discussion or appraisal of professional literature and research. This study investigates the perceived value of librarians' participation in journal clubs. Using a hermeneutic dialectic process, we built a construction of the value of journal club participation based on interviews with…