A literacy coach describes the various components of her work and how they combine to help teachers provide more effective literacy instruction. Walk-throughs, literacy team meetings, formal coaching, professional learning communities, and regular meetings with the principal enable her to understand what teachers need and then assist teachers in…

This article outlines the findings from an Economic and Social Research Council funded research project that investigated the impact of multi-agency working on children and their families. It explored the ways in which young people experience multi-agency working and it investigated whether young people perceive any benefits from a coordinated…

To live and work in today's global community, adults need to develop an intercultural responsiveness and flexibility in order to interact sensitively in situations involving international cultural contexts, practices, beliefs, understandings, and communications. One way to support this development in adult and higher education is to offer…

Research into networking and interactivity among practitioners is providing new information that has the potential to enhance the effectiveness of practice improvement initiatives. This commentary reviews the evidence that practitioner interactivity can facilitate emergent learning and behavior change that lead to practice improvements. Insights…

In a professional learning community, adults learn through focused conversations on teaching practices and teacher learning to support student learning. Teachers in a professional learning community push each other's thinking and learning about teaching through questioning. While there are multiple opportunities for this critical thinking to…

How novice lecturers learn to be successful in their role is relatively under-researched, although the assumption may be made that the newcomer has learned the fundamentals how to engage in academic practice--at least in terms of research and scholarship--via the PhD process. However, although many lecturers now enter from a professional or…

In this paper, we examined data collected as part of a 5-year project designed to foster reform-based urban science teaching through teachers' communities of inquiry. Drawing upon a distributed leadership framework, we analyzed teacher "talk" during professional learning community (PLC) meetings. This analysis yielded five elements:…

Environmental education researchers have called for a greater analysis of "learning" in environmental education in relation to contemporary theories and explanatory frameworks of learning. Situated learning, as a prominent example, is a sociocultural theory that contends that learning is a social process that occurs as individuals…

In New Zealand in order to provide authentic learning experiences teachers are counselled to access Communities of Practice (CoP) (Ministry of Education 2007). This research provides information about teachers' interactions with CoPs and the implication of this access on their pedagogy. A range of interactions occurred which was influenced by how…

We describe efforts to build a learning community to support technology integration in three rural school districts and the contributions of various program strategies toward teacher growth. The Stages of Adoption Inventory, classroom observations, the Questionnaire for Technology Integration, interviews, STAR evaluation surveys, a survey of…

This article explores the learning arising from a pilot inter-school visits programme in Stevenage, Hertfordshire. Teachers from two schools undertook a series of visits with the aim of developing learning and teaching in their schools. The pilot sought to understand ways in which such a collaborative visits programme could be used to build…

This article presents an interview with Cathy Carnahan, the 2011 MetLife/NASSP National Middle Level Principal of the Year. Carnahan makes adult learning a priority to support student achievement at Duniway Middle School in McMinnville, Oregon. She describes her school as a community of learners that is a safe setting for teachers to lead and…

This paper explores Indian women's views on arranged marriages in the United Kingdom. It is based on research carried out with 32 Indian women studying at a university in the South East of England, UK. The article draws on Wenger's social theory of learning to explore how Indian women's participation in communities of practice in higher education…

This qualitative case study examines an after-school, bilingual family literacy programme that brought together several groups to form a community of practice (CoP) that worked to support the literacy development of English language learners and their families. We explored the following question: How do parents, teachers, students, and other…

Scientific expertise and outcomes often give rise to controversy. An educational response that equips students to take part in such discussions is the teaching of socially acute questions (SAQs). With SAQs, the understanding of uncertainty, risk and how knowledge is developed is central. This study explores the way in which students from different…