The leader, more than any other individual in an organization, has a profound impact upon that organization's success. Whether in the business sector or public education, it is nearly impossible for an organization to acquire and sustain success without strong leadership. Many businesses go to great lengths to develop individuals with leadership…

Many schools have embraced the idea of professional learning communities (PLC's). While the term is used to describe many types of collaborative activities, PLC's are most successful when they focus intently on improving student learning. In these communities of learners there is a shared commitment to continually learn and act on that learning in…

There is a growing awareness of the need to move beyond generic approaches to teaching, learning and assessment (TLA) to consider the importance of context in shaping TLA practices. However, efforts to engage with context have focused primarily on disciplinary epistemologies and in particular the differences between hard, soft, pure and applied…

Knowledge Management (KM) and Technology-Enhanced Learning (TEL) have attracted attention over the past two decades and are meanwhile considered as important means to increase individual and organizational performance. There is, however, a wide agreement that traditional KM and TEL models have failed to cope with the fast-paced change and critical…

This paper looks into the importance of a responsible research community and how ethics can contribute towards the building of such a community. The paper starts off by outlining the many challenges facing a responsible research community. These challenges range from doing research, transferring the research results, commercialising the…

In the fall of 2007--aware that the continuing professional development of teachers is paramount to quality education--John Baird, head of Westtown School (Pennsylvania), asked the faculty Professional Development Committee (PDC), consisting of faculty representatives from all three divisions of the school, to design a "professional growth…

The Diagnostic Question Cluster (DQC) project integrates education research and faculty development to articulate a model for the effective transformation of introductory biology and ecology teaching. Over three years, faculty members from a wide range of institutions used active teaching and DQCs, a type of concept inventory, as pre- and…

During the last two decades there has been a growing awareness of the potentially strong role teacher collaboration can play in relation to teacher and team learning. Teachers collaborate with their colleagues in different formal and informal settings. Because most studies have focused on teacher learning in one collaborative setting or are…

Four novice teacher educators working at different universities in the USA and Canada used online journaling and dialoguing combined with feedback from their students to explore their practice and new roles as teacher educators in new contexts. Their priorities included modeling critical reflection and enacting democratic practices. They chronicle…

Simply put, professional development is evolving into something new and inspiring in the twenty-first century. Professional development is becoming more relevant, more reflective, and, most importantly, more social. Socially united groups give rise to a collective intelligence that bonds the members into a more ordered community. Collective social…

This paper draws on a range of theoretical perspectives on the construction of new teachers' professional identity. It focuses particularly on the impact of the development in many national education systems of a performative culture of the management and regulation of teachers' work. Whilst the role of interactions with professional colleagues…

In this article, we present key aspects of a research project entitled "Students' Cultural Diversity and School Efficacy: A Repertory of Best Practice in Compulsory Learning Centers." First, we present our concept of cultural diversity and a reflection regarding "best school practices" and the notion of "student…

This article examines email exchanges between eight Master's-level school counseling student interns and their internship supervisor to investigate how politeness strategies contribute to professional identity development in supervisory discourse. Our analysis demonstrates how identity development occurs via collaborative facework accomplished…

The paper argues that over the past two decades there has been a paradox at the heart of the literature on the professions: inter-professional work has been a growing feature of work in the global economy since the 1990s, however, this has been rarely acknowledged. The paper addresses this paradox in three ways. The paper explains how changes in…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to discuss the value of social learning from group work that emulates a professional community of practice. Design/methodology/approach: A thought piece that first, examines the role of group-work projects as part of social learning, then outlines key arguments for social learning based upon applying a…