This reaction article values the Major Contribution as an opportunity to hear the voices of ECPs who do not feel included in the Society of Counseling Psychology (SCP) and to engage in dialogue about the SCP as an organization. This response employs Gestalt theories of field and dialogue to understand how all members and affiliates of the SCP…

This paper considers the "policy work" of teacher actors in schools. It focuses on the "problem of meaning" and offers a typology of roles and positions through which teachers engage with policy and with which policies get "enacted". It argues that "policy work" is made up of a set of complex and…

Drawing on 14 years of collaborative self-study group work at their university, East and Fitzgerald reviewed the data, stories and findings from that collaborative work, seeking to go beyond those original stories to identify practical implications of the tensions that emerged and played out within the various groups. Findings were shared and…

Early childhood and early childhood special education programs have a focus on parent-educator partnerships. Parent-teacher conferences are a context for these partnerships, and advice giving is one type of exchange occurring within conferences. Parent-teacher conference advice was investigated through participant interviews and the methodology of…

Learning communities, a small cohort of students enrolled together in two or more linked courses, have become a popular intervention to help underprepared students succeed in college. Though learning communities abound in practice, the key structural feature of a learning community--the cohort--may not be fully understood. Authors posit that a…

Cooperative relationships are the foundation of a model of online learning based on communities. The development of a community depends on the interaction between community members. This study is based on the belief that the dynamics of exchange of thought, from a Piagetian perspective, are one possibility for understanding the process of…

This paper explores two different ontological positions from which policy in schools and teachers can be viewed. On the one hand, it explores the ways in which policies make up and make possible particular sorts of teacher subjects--as producers and consumers of policy, as readers and writers of policy. On the other, it begins to conceptualise the…

Built from data collected through three-phase in-depth interviews, this study explores from cultural and social perspectives why Chinese students may initially be termed silent participants when they first commence group work with western students; and then examines the impact of cultural interaction through group work on their adjustment.…

Understanding the suitability of multilevel modeling in the context of institutional research (IR) may ease the doubts of some IR professionals. However, the need for training on how to conduct and report multilevel modeling analysis remains. A major roadblock hindering the proliferation of multilevel modeling in IR is the perception that…

A community of practice provides a forum for professionals to exchange ideas and discuss concerns related to the profession. Within this forum, technology can eliminate many of the constraints face-to-face communities of practice encounter by providing a convenient and highly interactive environment. A description of how to set up an online…

The authors investigate how conversational routines, or the practices by which groups structure work-related talk, function in teacher professional communities to forge, sustain, and support learning and improvement. Audiotaped and videotaped records of teachers' work group interactions, supplemented by interviews and material artifacts, were…

In this study, the author investigated the creation of a community of learners in an under- graduate elementary music methods course. Participants included undergraduate students (n = 23) and a professor at a Midwestern liberal arts college. Data consisted of fieldnotes from class observations and interviews with the professor and students. The…

Fifty-one sixth graders participated in three rounds of online literature circles and three face-to-face literature circles. The authors describe how the online literature circles were introduced and organized in the classroom and discuss the tensions, struggles, and successes from their implementation. An analysis of qualitative data yielded…

Is it feasible to hold concurrent, small-group, peer-managed discussions in large elementary school classes? We sought an initial answer to this question in a fifth-grade class in Hefei, China. The 52 students in the class were divided into seven small groups. The seven groups held four simultaneous discussions without immediate supervision or…

This paper explores a middle school teacher's and his students' perceptions of the differences between online synchronous literature discussions and face-to-face literature discussions. Each member of this literature group participated in two face-to-face and two online literature discussions. Participants were interviewed twice to discuss their…