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.…

Using data in a professional learning community is a promising form of professional development. In this study, we followed a data team of teacher educators, who systematically tried to improve the education of student teachers (by decreasing first year drop-out). By conducting a single case study, we investigated the data team participants'…

We discuss the utility of a coding system designed to evaluate the amount and type of parent talk during individualized family service plan (IFSP) meetings. The iterative processes used to develop the "Parent Communication Coding System" (PCCS) and its associated codes are described. In addition, we explored whether PCCS codes could be…

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…

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.…

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…

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…