This study utilized a survey research design to examine how school superintendents use concepts found in Professional Learning Communities (PLCs) with district leadership teams to improve professional capital in members of the leadership team. The research sought the correlation between the factors identified through factor analysis, as well as…

Massive Open Online Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) have been transitioning slowly from being completely open and without clear recognition in universities or industry, to private settings through the emergence of Small and Massive Private Online Courses (SPOCs and MPOCs). Courses in these new formats are often for credit and have clear market…

The role of teaching presence in online courses has received significant attention within the Community of Inquiry (CoI) framework since Anderson, Rourke, Garrison, and Archer (2001) proposed a set of categories of teaching presence and a tool to assess them. However, there has been limited research addressing whether the instrument proposed by…

Until recently, existing research on teacher professional development (PD) has largely relied on teacher perceptions and self-reports to evaluate effectiveness. Though more current research has used a diverse array of designs and methodologies to examine impact on teacher knowledge, practice, and student learning, uncertainty regarding the…

Research in the field of collaboration in Virtual Learning Communities (VLCs) has mainly focused in learning and social interactions. At the same time, research related to cyberbullying mainly refers to social media contexts. In the current research, bullying behavior was examined through the collaboration process between learning communities. Two…

Our work concerned the socio-cultural practices of tutors from diverse higher education institutes. The tutors were practising lecturers who had contributed to peer assessment studies published in refereed academic journals. Analysis of interview data considered the relational interdependency of tutors' and students' activity in the socially and…

The benefits of creating learning communities have been clearly established in educational literature. However, the research on 'community-of-learning' has largely focused on intermediate and high-school contexts and on the benefits of co-facilitation in the classroom. In this paper, we contribute to educational research by describing an approach…

We present a model of an induction program that supports early career physics teachers as well as experienced teachers who face new challenges in their teaching of physics. The model involves personal mentorship embedded in a teachers' professional community of practice led by senior physics teachers and supported by a physics education research…

Studies on physics identity have shown that it is one of the main factors that can predict a person's persistence in the field; therefore, studying physics identity is critical to increase diversity within the field of physics and to understand what changes can allow more women and minorities to identify with the field. In this study, we…

The Ministry of Education in New Zealand in 2013 provided funding for universities to develop and implement initial teacher education programmes with innovative school-university partnerships to promote the success of graduates. To enhance the success of this new programme, four teacher educators reviewed the literature on school-university…

We Love Weather is the fan community of The Weather Channel. Launched in 2016, We Love Weather aims to serve so-called "weather geeks" by providing exclusive and specialized weather content, as well as participatory and communal elements. This study proposes that We Love Weather is an "affinity space" where participants create,…

Faculty learning communities, a specialized form of communities of practice, are not new. These communities provide opportunities for learning, feedback, and collegiality. Even with all of these benefits, many faculty have never participated in a learning community, sometimes because colleges and schools have not yet established one. This paper…

Purpose: This study explored one physical education teacher's engagement in an online professional learning community and her perceptions of its impact on her own feelings of isolation. Sense of community theory was used as a lens to explore the data. Method: Using a single instrumental case study design, the participant of this study was a female…

This conceptual paper revisits a set of pivotal learning community notions filtered through sociological and community psychology perspectives to unravel representations of the community construct within learning contexts. A conceptual review of sociological and community psychology perspectives on the community construct is initially presented.…

With the increasing demand for improved student achievement in mathematics, few studies have been conducted examining teacher efficacy when continuously supported through a collaborative professional learning community (PLC) structure. This study examined teacher efficacy within PLC activities in a middle school. Both the belief that mathematics…