The issue of sustaining and scaling up professional development for mathematics teachers raises several fundamental issues for researchers. This commentary addresses various definitions for sustainability and scaling up and how these definitions may affect the design of programs as well as the design of research. We consider four of the papers in…

This paper examines the concept of learning communities as defined in the literature. An existing case study is described, and the issues that facilitated and constrained the development of this learning community are considered and discussed. Strategies to address threats to the ongoing viability and usefulness of a learning community to support…

Although calls continue to establish certification, several certifications for human resource development (HRD) practitioners already exist, although none use the name HRD. This Forum explores what those certification programs are and what their availability means to the development of the HRD "brand" (the impressions of the service derived from…

The aim of our study was to examine formalized mentoring as a learning strategy for volunteer sports coaches and to consider implications for other volunteer groups in the community. Despite the increasingly popular use of mentoring as a learning and support strategy across professional domains, and the sheer scale of volunteer sports coach…

The Educational Leadership Master's Cohort Program at Delta State University was redesigned in 2011 to reflect current industry standards and streamline the program. Since its inception in the mid-1990s, the program has provided a nationally acclaimed model for principal preparation. The recent redesign focused on preparing school principals to…

The intent of this article is to examine how the best type of internship, i.e., the full-time, job-embedded model can be enhanced using coaching. Before illustrating an exemplary internship program with coaching, this paper describes what an exemplary full-time, job-embedded internship experiences looks like and expounds on the importance of…

Teacher professional development is a key factor for transforming professional and school culture. This article describes a case study undertaken in a Spanish school during the 2007-2008 academic year. Our aim is to explain how action research methodology was applied to encourage professional and school culture towards an intercultural and…

Two recent studies by Biancarosa et al. and by Saunders et al. have finally demonstrated that "job-embedded, sustained professional development" can significantly improve student achievement. But there's a catch. In both studies, effective professional development (PD) strategies were successful only under certain circumstances or only in some…

This article describes the use of "business-driven" action learning in a healthcare setting. It reviews and reflects on an example where action learning does not "take", identifying the likely causes of this. It also poses four questions--whether action learning is counter-cultural in some organisations; whether the…

Many mentoring policies do not differentiate between novice special education teachers and their general education counterparts. Although novice special education teachers may benefit in part from general induction practices, their experience is limited when there is little attention given to their unique instructional needs. Policymakers can…

This monograph describes and analyzes the particular processes and structures that the New York City Writing Project (NYCWP) directors and on-site teacher-consultants have developed that enable them to support and learn from each other and to reflect critically upon the work they do with teachers, students, and administrators. Over time the…