Teachers play a key role in realizing successful changes in education. Among them are real "change agents" at both classroom and school level. To obtain insights into what characterizes these teachers, an exploratory study has been conducted by interviewing external experts, principals, and teachers (n = 20). An analysis of data resulted…

In the early summer of 2009 David Dietrich was a tenured faculty member at Lambuth University, a small liberal arts college when a friend from the University of Tennessee (UTM) at Martin called about a job opportunity. Because Lambuth had been struggling financially for many years and there was talk of the school closing its doors, Dietrich was…

The focus of this study was to develop an orientation program that would assist adjunct faculty to gain specific competencies to facilitate an online course. The orientation curriculum employed a set of guiding questions that focused on the intellectual, cognitive, and applicable skills adjunct faculty would need to facilitate an online course. To…

Experience is fundamental in identity development. In research, concepts and issues around identity are shaped and confronted in moments of reflection. The act of reflection requires a backward attention to engender a present understanding and create future possibilities. Kim and Greene, and Young and Erickson capture this temporal aspect of…

The idea of reflection is central to the theory and practice of learning--especially learning which is grounded in past or current experience. This paper proposes a working definition of reflection and reviews its origins and recent developments. The author also provides an account of "critical reflection", including its rationale and…

My departure from traditional methods of teaching and assessment (i.e., lecture and close-ended exams) was prompted years ago by a "gut feeling" that has morphed into an explicit examination of my teaching practice and students' reactions to it. The scholarly approach and empirical evidence in "Teachers and Learning"…

This paper contributes to the debate on what constitutes good teaching in early 21st Century higher education, through an examination of the experience of five outstanding lecturers from a business school in an Australian university. It is based on a qualitative study that explored their perceptions on what constitutes "good teaching".…

This study used Hierarchical Linear Modeling to analyze the relationship between school organizational behaviors and practices (at the school level) on teachers' reports of internal and external physiological sources of efficacy. Six hundred sixty-one teachers from 42 schools in the United States were surveyed to measure both individual sources of…

Elementary teachers are criticized for failing to incorporate meaningful science instruction in their classrooms or avoiding science instruction altogether. The lack of adequate science instruction in elementary schools is partially attributed to teacher candidates' anxiety, poor content and pedagogical preparation, and low science teaching…

Teacher research has been included in university and graduate teacher education programs for the past 2 decades. Recently, associate degree programs have also begun to engage their students in teacher research. What happens when community college early childhood students conduct teacher research as a course assignment? This study involved 8 former…

In 2013, with a 30% state budget cut after the Great Recession, many of the 450,000 California State University (CSU) students across the 23-campus system were unable to enroll in courses they needed to move closer to graduation; there was a lack of available course sections. In addition to a reduced number of seats available for students, 30% to…

This article presents contemporary commentary on the previously published articles "Writing for the Reader: A Problem-Solution Approach" and "Motivating Learners at South Korean Universities." Having been out of the field of English as a foreign language for several years, the author was surprised and pleased when he was asked to write some…

The notion of reflection has become an object of attention in education, but the research on this topic is often reduced to mere reflective practice. A relevant part of educational literature portrays reflection as a wholly beneficial practice for practitioners, but also for researchers. In the nursing field, in particular, reflection is largely…

This article presents the author's response to peer commentary on his article entitled "Reflections on 50 years of teaching psychology." The author is pleased that most of them share some of his concerns about the lack of progress in the teaching of psychology over the last 50 years, and he welcomes the fact that they then go on to raise…

This article considers conversations in and about education. To focus the discussion, it uses the scenario of a conversation between a trainee teacher and her mentor reflecting together on a lesson that the trainee has just taught. I begin by outlining the notion of reflective practice as popularised by Donald Schon, and show how, in the scenario,…