With degree in hand, and ink nearly dry on their first contract, new teachers enter the educational field ready to change students' lives. Filled with hopes, ideas, and excitement, they file into classrooms and begin classroom preparations for their first year. More often than not, novice educators appear to be easily and quickly overwhelmed by…

I know that most men, including those at ease with problems of the greatest complexity, can seldom accept the simplest and most obvious truth if it be such as would oblige them to admit the falsity of conclusions which they have proudly taught to others, and which they have woven, thread by thread, into the fabrics of their life. (Tolstoy, 1894)…

This article examines the nature of relationships between funders and applied theatre companies. Recognising that this is a murky terrain where competing agendas and goals can jeopardise the effectiveness of applied theatre programmes, the article traces the history of the funding relationship between Applied Theatre Consultants Ltd and Child,…

This study examined career satisfaction among experienced professors at a moderate-sized liberal arts college and explored their motivations for staying in the profession. Experienced professors were defined as tenure-track faculty who had been teaching in higher education for at least 15 years. Data sources included the Experienced Teacher…

Some teaching centers flounder while others flourish. This paper provides concrete suggestions for launching or revitalizing a teaching center, drawn from the experiences of these authors and from principles in the literature. Two center directors worked to apply the principles in the literature to their newly launched or revitalized centers. One…

Background/Context: Researchers have proposed a number of lenses for analyzing teacher professional communities in recent years. These lenses have been useful in describing key dynamics of professional communities; however, none provides a compelling approach to how to integrate data from the school as a whole with case study data on individual…

This article addresses the perceived gap between the humanities and social sciences, and the sciences in kinesiology faculties and departments as interdisciplinary pressures mount in an increasingly complex world. I use an historical lens to highlight past difficulties in working across the two solitudes and describe Stephen Jay Gould's efforts to…

Purpose: Scholars have focused their attention on systemic reform as a way to support instructional coherence. These efforts are often layered on to existing social relationships between school staff that are rarely taken into account when enacting reform. Social network theory posits that the structure of social relationships may influence the…

While there is a growing body of literature promoting a new paradigm of differentiated professional development in which teachers' voices shape learning opportunities, the reality is that much professional development continues in an outdated, top-down mode. Teacher input is rarely solicited to determine the perceptions of teachers regarding their…

Len Barton is acutely aware of the power of the academy to either enhance critical thinking or to depress it. He is a true academic, never accepting the received wisdom or perspective of any given sociological standpoint, no matter how powerful or fashionable it was at the time. He has encouraged and promoted a unique blend of professional and…

Written by the director and staff of the first, and one of the largest, teaching centers in American higher education--the University of Michigan's Center for Research on Learning and Teaching (CRLT)--this book offers a unique perspective on the strategies for making a teaching center integral to an institution's educational mission. It presents a…

This article explores the experiences of teaching assistants from nonmainstream backgrounds in a predominantly white institution (PWI) of U.S. education. We focus on how such teaching assistants experience and respond to "microaggressions" or subtle challenges to their teaching based on race and ethnicity. We also explore the consequences of…

Despite that fact that the demand for asynchronous learning is booming, the literature on distance learning facilitation skills is lacking (Sherry, 1996). This study supports the premise that the use of paraphrasing strategies impacts learners in an asynchronous environment. The research question has been narrowed to inspect the particular…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to explore informal contexts of teachers' workplace professional learning and inform educational researchers, teacher educators, administrators and teachers about ways in which teachers learn to improve their practice. By questioning how teachers learn on-the-job to be better teachers and how school cultures…

Managerial coaching is popularized as a way of motivating, developing and retaining employees in organizations. Yet, there has been lack of empirical studies to examine the linkage between managerial coaching and its potential impact on employees. This study investigated the relationships among managerial coaching and employees' personal learning,…