This study moves from theory to practice to theory. Through multiple narratives, I present how theory and practice work together to produce praxis, defined as critical pedagogy. The story takes place through my experience as teacher and researcher, but it shows how the theory takes place in practice on many different levels. I present a critical…

In this paper the author makes a short presentation of an ongoing longitudinal research project in Sweden. However, he wants to focus on the theoretical perspective he has found fruitful for his understanding of music teachers' professional socialisation, and on the question whether the music teacher must also be a musician in order to possess…

This paper discusses initial findings on teacher identity, as perceived and negotiated by four pre-service secondary-school teachers during an action research project at a regional university. Through systematic collaborative reflection, the group explored the dissonance between theory and practice in order to make sense of their emerging teacher…

Determining the potential benefits of mentoring is confounded by the lack of clarity surrounding the definition of mentoring in business and industry. Key dimensions of mentoring that are affected by the way in which mentoring is defined are explored, including prevalence, outcomes, gender and formal/informal relationships. This definitional…

This paper draws on research that has recently been conducted in Australia on the possibility of formulating professional standards for teachers of English in primary and secondary schools. English teachers around the country have played a vital role in the project, writing stories in an effort to capture "accomplished" English teaching,…

This article explores the effects upon teacher learning of engaging in classroom research within the context of a teacher's professional life as a middle manager in a large urban school. The article is co-written by the teacher and his tutor on the Master of Teaching programme at the Institute of Education, University of London, where teacher…

This article will draw on an investigation of teachers' research in a small-scale project involving 19 schools in the North West region of England. The teachers engaged in the research were funded by a government initiative, the Best Practice Research Scholarships Programme, and were mentored and tutored by university staff. The sample is very…

The ways in which teachers and head teachers integrate external summative testing and formative assessment practices were explored by means of a questionnaire survey and a small number of case studies. A clear distinction was found between end of key stage tests and optional tests in the extent to which they could be used directly to support…

Social work has evolved over the years taking on the challenges of the times. The profession now espouses a breadth of theoretical approaches and treatment modalities. We have developed a model to help graduate social work students master the skill of integrating theory and social work practice. The Integrative Model has five components: (l) The…

The Model-Assisted Reasoning in Science (MARS) project seeks to promote model-centered instruction as a means of improving middle-school science education. As part of the evaluation of the sixth-grade curriculum, performance of MARS and non-MARS students was compared on a curriculum-neutral task. Fourteen students participated in structured…

A review of the three articles on feminist identity development in this issue indicates that (a) the Feminist Identity Development Scale (FIDS) and the Feminist Identity Composite (FIC) perform similarly and acceptably in psychometric analyses, (b) no research has properly tested whether there are true stages of feminist identity development, and…

"What gets assessed is what gets taught" is a common assertion whose meaning is often underestimated. It is not just "what" gets assessed, but "how" it is assessed that has implications for what is learned. When a child who is asked the meaning of his report card grades responds, "If I knew that I'd be the…

There is a strong international interest in the enhancement of teaching quality. Enhancement is a big job because teaching is an extensive activity. It is a complex job because learning to teach is not, mainly, a formal process: non-formal, practice-based learning is more significant. These two points, extensiveness and practice-based learning,…

The importance of the concept of professional identity lies in its relationship to professional knowledge and action, but these links are complex. A traditional notion of identity is of something essential about ourselves, a fixed and stable core of "self". More recently, however, identity has been seen as an ongoing and performative…

At the turn of the millennium, the term "spiritual" began to gain more prominence in the educational discourse in Hong Kong, both in official policy documents and in religious schools' descriptions of their own mission. Addressing each of these two cases in turn, a description of the context in which the increased use of the term has…