A teacher professional development program for in-service elementary school science teachers, the Rice Elementary Model Science Lab (REMSL), was developed for urban school districts serving predominately high-poverty, high-minority students. Teachers with diverse skills and science capacities came together in Professional Learning Communities, one…

Purpose: Online programs rely on the use of educational technology for knowledge sharing in academic virtual communities of practice (vCoPs). This poses the question as to which factors influence technology acceptance. Previous research has investigated the inter-relationship between educational technology acceptance (ETA) and the vCoP context…

Although reflection is seen as a means to improve teacher professionalism, its practice in Indonesia has a scant regard until the lesson study program was implemented around the year 2005. In Indonesian context, lesson study is a process by which teachers and teacher educators work together to critically improve the quality of classroom practice…

Professional Learning Communities (PLCs) have shown promise as a means to meet the challenge of the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001. A problem that has surfaced is the inabilty of schools to sustain PLCs. This project study examined leadership characteristics of elementary school principals in selected school districts to determine how these…

Active principal leadership can help sustain and scale science curriculum reform. This study illustrates how principal leadership developed in a professional learning community to support a technology-enhanced science curriculum reform funded by the National Science Foundation. Seven middle school and high school principals in one urban-fringe…

"Central High School," a rural school composed largely of students of color from low income homes, experienced a quick, remarkable turnaround of student academic success, measured by State and Federal accountability standards. This turnaround began with an external restructuring grant initiative that required a state-approved external…

The establishment of school-based learning networks is one of the more significant recent changes in the way that professional learning and organizational change have been conceptualized. This article argues that network development requires facilitation and conceptualizes this work as brokerage, a concept highlighting the tensions of working as…

This article explores how participation in a community of learning supported transformation on a personal and professional level in a Master's programme at a South African university. It draws on the concept of transformational learning in the professional preparation of educational psychologists, and how such learning plays out in the development…

An educational leadership preparation program for the 21st Century not only makes use of innovations in teaching and learning, but pushes the educational experience forward through the effective use of advanced technologies. This idea frames the delivery methodology for a blended online principal preparation program. The blended online program was…

Introduction: The perceived information needs of teachers who specialize in reading instruction for at-risk first graders were studied and related to frameworks for the role of social context in information needs, seeking and use. The frameworks considered were: disciplinarity, role theory in work settings, small worlds and information grounds and…

The purpose of this program evaluation study was to design, implement, and evaluate the effectiveness of incorporating an online learning community as part of a comprehensive new-teacher induction program. The researcher, who serves as the middle school principal and new induction coordinator for the school district, used a mixed-method approach…

Connecting discipline scholars with the scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL) is accepted as an essential part of professional academic practice across the higher education sector irrespective of discipline. To connect meaningfully with teaching practice, SoTL needs to be translated by the discipline scholar and narratives related to the…

A Hawaiian cultural-based agricultural and environmental science professional development course was transformed based on the precepts of situated learning in communities of practice, and offered to K-12 teachers. In this article we describe the format and content of the transformed course based on lessons learned from previous years offered to…

Although there is a need for continued pedagogical advancement in science undergraduate education, what is needed more urgently is more widespread adaptation of pedagogical practices that research has already shown to promote learning. Those practices include interactive engagement pedagogies such as active learning and inquiry-based learning. The…

Inter-organizational collaboration is often seen as a means of increasing the potential for bringing about outcomes that none of the organizations could achieve alone. For example, funding agencies that provide grants for teacher professional development often encourage or require collaboration between institutions of higher education and schools.…