Professional learning communities (PLCs) are a powerful school improvement strategy designed to advance teacher professional development. Protocols are tools for structuring teacher conversations in PLCs. In this article the authors present the results of a qualitative study of teacher perspectives about the value and effects of systematic…

Many studies highlight the importance of socio-emotional aspects in professional communities of practice (CoP). This study aims to understand how these aspects are articulated with the professional content. An online professional CoP has been subjected to analysis by following a sequential exploratory mixed-methods inductive model combining the…

The authors explored five in-service teachers' experiences of professional development (PD) in Studies in Writing (30 ECTS programme at a Finnish open university) they participated in during their leisure time. Data consist of the teachers' creative writings and semi-structured interviews. Reflexive thematic analysis was employed to holistically…

The authors argue that the professional learning practices of teachers in precarious employment may have a significant impact upon their understandings of specific policy reforms. The analysis considers a teacher's understandings of learning about a new policy in light of the various 'epistemological resources' he brought to bear to his learning…

This paper is aimed at exploring teachers' perceptions and practices of peer support in Bangladeshi primary schools. It also looks into the contrast between the perceptions and practices, and the underlying reasons behind such deviations. The study collects data from teachers who are undergoing a large-scale teacher development project called…

This study builds on another project focused on primary grade teachers' integration of technology (screencasting). Original findings showed that participating teachers changed their practices to better align with research-based practices in early mathematics teaching. Two years later, the authors returned to the district to work with teachers from…

Sharing teachers' professional knowledge remains challenging. Teachers' development often remains ad hoc or local, and attempts to scale this up have proved problematic. To address this, research in areas such as 'learning design' has explored the use of formal representations of practice. This proposes that educational practice can be improved by…

This study investigated the impact that the experience of living and teaching in the United Kingdom (UK) had on the belief development of three native Chinese language teachers. The study used a multifaceted approach to analyse the teachers as social beings and their belief development beyond the confines of the classroom. The analysis is based on…

A study of a discipline-specific teacher development project designed to prepare teachers to implement a series of core instructional practices for pre-collegiate history teaching is described as a model that can be applied to any content discipline. Teachers were surveyed concerning the success of the project in achieving the goals it set,…

This narrative account draws on dialogic approaches to education to critically reflect on teachers' expressed pedagogic thinking in community. The context for the study is a teacher community in Central Finland comprising teachers from pre-primary to upper secondary contexts. The shared interest of the community is in the foreign-language…

In this study, an American public school principal's vision of promoting growth in her teachers and students was inspired by the Reggio Emilia approach. Unlike other educational approaches, this approach did not involve a product, i.e., "to become Reggio", and it did not involve a set of rules or mandates. Instead, the principal had her…

A year long study group brought teachers and researchers working in urban contexts in US public schools together to examine literacy practices incorporating students' community literacies into schooled tasks. The goal was to provide teacher development in making connections across their students' community literacies and the academic literacy they…