At a regional Australian university, a Learning Circle approach was implemented with a small group of first year education students who identified themselves as "at risk" of failure in the tertiary context. As part of their participation in weekly meetings, the students engaged in discussion, reflection and problem-solving related to…

Online learning communities provide opportunities for connections in several ways: instructor to students, students to instructor, and students to students. As online instructors and researchers, we describe the essential elements for developing online learning communities and the strategies we've used for creating these type of learning…

Many postsecondary institutions utilize learning communities to increase social engagement and attachment to the college community. In recent years, these communities have proliferated as part of a trend fueled by low retention and persistence rates, increasing reluctance of 4-year institutions to provide remedial education, and pressure on…

In an era of prolific funding for varied small-school models, there is a growing emphasis on schools that alter the landscape of educational design. Some of these models attempt to redesign schools to place students at the center of learning and provide powerful examples of very different ways of thinking about teaching and learning (some examples…

Nine teacher educators in their first three years as tenure-track professors in an education faculty established a self-study group in 2006-2007. These professors met once a month to link their teaching and service to scholarship through the self-study of teacher education practices. In addition, members met in pairs or small groups to develop…

This review sought to locate key themes in the literature on teaching and learning thinking and practices, by examining areas of influence and mapping ideas about the themes of practice, transfer and communities in higher education or related contexts. The findings indicate that issues of pedagogical stance, disjunction, learning spaces, agency,…

I argue in this article that identity as a mathematical thinker develops through self-directed learning within a supportive community of practice. The dynamic nature of identity as a mathematical thinker is illustrated by considering the experiences of primary pre-service teachers who undertook a mathematics and technology subject in their…

Using a communities-of-practice framework, this qualitative study investigated what eight teachers learned about literacy teaching and learning through participation in the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards certification process. This article presents two selected teacher cases which suggest that the National Board process created…

The Institute for Scholarship on Engineering Education (ISEE) team of the Center for the Advancement of Engineering Education, designed and implemented a 120 minute interactive session called "Communities In Practice--What Are We Learning?" for the 2006 Frontiers in Education Conference in Indianapolis. Six story posters were provided by 8…

A nomadic collaborative partnership model for a community of practice (CoP) in Design for Learning (D4L) can facilitate successful innovation and continuing appraisals of effective professional practice, stimulated by a "critical friend" assigned to the project. This paper reports on e-learning case studies collected by the UK JISC eLIDA…

A survey asked medical students studying the basic sciences to identify effective learning strategies. The purposes of the survey were three-fold: firstly, to identify learning strategies that students prefer; secondly, to encourage students to evaluate their learning strategies; and thirdly, to inform faculty about their students' learning…

This article describes "Youthscapes," a year-round afterschool program in the San Francisco East Bay Area (CA) that offers urban youth the opportunity to use technology to reconstruct their identities in at least two ways: (1) by encouraging its apprentices to create media content that directly counteracted stereotypes about urban youth;…

A study into how academics learn to assess student performance affirms the significance of context in understanding learning in the academic workplace. The study involved three case studies in academic departments with significant differences in the teaching, research and professional dimensions of academic life. This article reports on the…

Introduction: Virtual communities play an important role in innovation. The paper focuses on the particular form of collective action in virtual communities underlying as Open Source software development projects. Method: Building on resource mobilization theory and private-collective innovation, we propose a theory of collective action in…

The purpose of this article is to provide a model of an academic intervention and support program in literacy that focuses on the needs of individual students and revalues them as readers, goals that are of extreme importance when working with adolescents who have repeatedly experienced academic failure and view themselves as poor readers. This…