As pressures on new academic staff members increase and change, academic developers need to find different ways of working with them. This paper offers for discussion a new way of supporting early career academics in their negotiation of liminality, the betwixt and between space separating old and new roles. We call this innovative approach…

This paper examines the initial steps of an internationally funded project focused on enhancing teachers' conceptual and pedagogical knowledge of literacy development in the Western Cape of South Africa. We asked what are the tensions and breakthroughs when engaged in international teacher professional development? Four lines of inquiry support…

Faculty learning about service-learning is an important area of research because understanding how faculty develop their practice is an important first step in improving student learning outcomes and relationships with community members. Enacting reciprocity in service-learning can be particularly troublesome because it requires faculty to learn…

This article reports on a two-year study of a self-study research group facilitation. The research group was designed as a professional development project in which six experienced teacher educators investigated their practices using a self-study approach. The pedagogical rationale of the facilitation was based on four broadly shared theoretical…

This case study research reports on elementary (grade 8) and secondary school (grade 9) teachers' participation in job-embedded, professional learning and engagement in collaborative inquiry. Teachers constructed an inquiry-oriented media literacy unit following the collaborative inquiry model. The current study sought to investigate how…

This paper deals with a crucial topic: which factors influence the sustainability and scale-up of a professional development programme's impact? Theoretical models and empirical findings from impact research (e.g. Zehetmeier and Krainer, "ZDM Int J Math" 43(6/7):875-887, 2011) and innovation research (e.g. Cobb and Smith,…

The aim of this study was to investigate the role of the instructional leader when introducing digital technology into the mathematics teaching in the Australian Curriculum. The research reported here involves the principal and five teachers from one school and is part of a larger study. Results indicated that principal-led "crucial…

This study focuses on using wikis as a learning environment, as part of a professional development program for chemistry teacher leaders. The study was performed in Israel and involved 20 chemistry teachers. One goal was to investigate how using wiki may promote effective science teacher professional development. Various aspects of the teachers'…

This qualitative case study describes how one beginning primary grade teacher benefited from collaborative lesson-planning meetings with her grade-level colleagues. The teacher accumulated knowledge of curriculum, pedagogy, and professional contexts as she participated in planning meetings each week during her first year of teaching. Furthermore,…

To help the United States stay globally competitive in terms of innovation and invention, the teaching of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) has become a priority in P-12 education today. As the need for students to become stronger in STEM grows, so does the need for well-qualified STEM teachers who understand what is needed…

This article explores the use of blogs for pre-service language teacher education in two national settings, the UK (University of Cambridge) and the US (University of South Florida). Taking two approaches to blogging and to learning through blogging (one based on self-reflection and a constructivist approach and one based on social and…

A Victorian government initiative called "The Primary Science Specialists Professional Learning Program" is designed to tackle students' falling interest in science by investing in the building of teacher capacity. The aims of the initiative are: to improve the science knowledge base of all teachers and therefore increase teachers'…

Academic development has had an approximately forty-year history within Australian higher education, paralleling the major expansions and changes in the sector, both nationally and internationally. Its principal concerns have been the improvement of teaching and the professional development of the academics who teach. The history of academic…

This study investigates how a teacher study group collectively examined problems in their current English curriculum and redesigned the curriculum into theme-based lessons for various grades. Comprised of seven elementary school teachers and a teacher educator, the teacher study group met bi-weekly for three hours for a total of eight meetings.…

This article contributes to understanding of the professional learning of expert school teachers when they are appointed as university-based teacher educators. In this case study of a single department a qualitative analysis is used to interpret the transcripts of 16 semi-structured interviews with lecturers in teacher education within four years…