This book offers a selection of stories about teaching, learning, and school life that you can use in a variety of PD formats and settings. Grouped into four categories--students, teachers, administrators, and parents--these tales offer a powerful entry point for thinking and reflecting on your school environment in a new and meaningful way. Each…

All teachers require professional learning throughout their careers to ensure they are effective practitioners. This article reports on outcomes from a doctoral study that explored the impact of teachers transitioning between primary school year levels. The findings suggest that transition can have a significant impact on teachers' professional…

"Examining and Facilitating Reflection to Improve Professional Practice" is specifically designed and organized to be used throughout a teacher-education program from an introductory foundations course, continuing through content-specific methods classes to graduate-level theory seminars, and, ultimately onto professional development workshops.…

In this commentary on the paper by the Bank Street Reading and Literacy Alumnae Group, Korthagen states that, while it provides an excellent example of how fruitful professional development can be when it is grounded in the needs and strengths of the people involved; regretfully, many traditional approaches to professional development are based on…

Collaboration and reflection are critical to effective teaching and student progress in reading. Responding to the needs of linguistically and culturally diverse students who struggle in reading is a persistent challenge for teachers, especially those in urban settings. Conversations between literacy coaches and teachers in urban settings provide…

Preparing teachers to be reflective practitioners is the goal embraced by most teacher education programs. Reflective practitioners infuse personal beliefs and values into a professional identity, resulting in the development of a deliberate code of conduct. They challenge assumptions and expectations that may limit their potential for tolerance…

This paper reflects on the role of mobile learning in teachers' professional learning. It argues that effective professional learning requires reflection and collaboration and that mobile learning is ideally suited to allow reflection-in-action and to capture the spontaneity of learning moments. The paper also argues for the value of…

Just as linguistic errors have provided insights into the nature of linguistic competence(s), detailed analyses of blind spots or "marked trajectories" in the reflection cycles of novice teachers may provide a window on their underlying beliefs, and thus on relevant zones of proximal development. In this paper we analyse a case study in an…

An integrative approach views professional development for adult educators as learner centered and transformative; it should address motivation and technology. A new vision of professional development reconceptualizes the process to include understanding of contexts, active learning, reflection, and dialogue. (SK)

This article describes a process whereby faculty can self-assess their cross-cultural sensitivity as it relates to promoting a positive learning environment in our multicultural classrooms. This self-assessment measure encourages personal reflection and is intended to perpetuate professional growth that can use self-understanding as a foundation…

"Just as we 'do' laundry in a certain way...so, too, we 'do' school. As educators, we gather students, we sort them (by grade level, ability, or both), we teach them, we test them, and we grade them." --From the Preface. The 20 thought-provoking poems in this collection are meant to promote reflective conversation about how educators do school.…

This book focuses on learning as a social process. The language of teaching and learning within classroom literacy lessons, and how this language contributes to building a culture of learning, is a key principle that underlies each concept presented in the book. Each of the chapters asks teachers to examine the interactive nature of classroom life…

Practice-based or experiential learning has come to be dominated by mentalist models of reflection on experience. The argument here is that these models split mind from body and subject from environment in ways that yield problematic practices. An alternate conception of practice-based learning is offered here, based on the notion of…

Productive pedagogies (PP) is an influential framework for teaching and learning that has featured well in current reforms of teacher education. The present study was designed to examine principles of PP adopted by a cohort of beginning mathematics teachers. A networked online learning environment, WebCT[TM], facilitated the teachers'…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to propose an electronic support tool that can be used by teacher educators and novice teachers to foster habits of reflective, systematic instructional planning. Design/methodology/approach: The authors provide a rationale for their work, present a theoretical framework, propose a unique instructional design…