A year after embarking on program redesign to align with CPED principles and practices, faculty from a small doctoral program at a private university assessed their work. Specific initiatives such as embedding social justice principles into program components and revising admissions strategies were largely successful. Conversely, attempts to…

This phenomenological case study examined the link between teacher practice within the classroom and a newly implemented middle school social studies Professional Learning Community (PLC). More specifically, the use of mandates, theories, and activities were investigated through a series of teacher interviews, classroom observations,…

Noting the lack of resources to meet face-to-face, most notably time, a significant body of research has investigated the use of computer-mediated communication (CMC) to replace face-to-face interactions of teacher professional learning communities (PLCs). Equally noted is the research on social constructivist theory that supports social…

The purpose of this study was to add to the knowledge on the value of professional communities of practice as a performance improvement intervention. Value was defined as the awareness of the benefits and outcomes, provided as improvement in a tangible or intangible way, that positively impact organizations and/or individuals and their personal…

Communities of Practice are an increasingly common tool used to support novice academics in higher education settings. Initiated in 2015 at a Western Australian University, TLABs is an acronym for 'Teaching and Learning for Level A and B' academic staff and was designed to build a community of practice to mentor junior academics; help them develop…

The Boston University (BU) Prison Education Program (PEP) offers undergraduate degrees to students who are incarcerated at two Massachusetts state prisons. Twenty-five full-time BU and adjunct faculty teach postsecondary education courses to students who are incarcerated in a variety of liberal arts subjects in the program. This needs assessment…

Regional professional learning networks support school change by linking principals to others engaged in similar change work. While increasingly prevalent, little is known about the factors that contribute to the formation of ties between network members, or how knowledge moves across the network. Using social network analysis, this study examined…

Lifelong learning, with the help of digital technology, possesses the capacity to offer individual significant advantages to individual learners. This paper examines both the diverse approaches to lifelong learning and the digital tools available to promote these strategies. The paper contains a review of some of the main articles pertaining to…

Video is a rich medium that conveys more social cues than text. Use of video in an online discussion forum therefore has the potential to increase social presence in online learning environments. This experimental study compared a group using video for a portion of the required discussion posts to a group using only text in an online undergraduate…

Research on teacher professional learning communities (PLCs) has found that part of their benefit comes from increased collegiality. And yet, while the nature of such collegiality is theoretically multifaceted and includes a combination of instrumental, expressive and substantive relationships, this multidimensional nature of PLCs is almost never…

This paper describes a case study of how situated learning and community of practice theory were applied to the design and delivery of activities and learning assessments in a remote WIL course in a master-level Kinesiology program, supporting students' learning in professional placements. The rationale and theoretical grounding for the course…

Increasingly, academics are engaging with the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL). However, within United Kingdom higher education, the definition of and activities that constitute SoTL remain open to debate. In this article, we explore SoTL through four career histories that give insight into how SoTL has developed and played a role in…

Professional development communities (PDCs) are professional learning communities for teacher development in schools. Israeli educational reforms made principals responsible for staff professional development and introduced a teacher-led, PDC-based program called Hashkafa for teacher development. The current study examined principals' views…

An innovative system-building initiative known as the STEM Learning Ecosystems Community of Practice (SLECoP) is transforming U.S. STEM education through cross-sector partnerships between schools, afterschool and summer programs, libraries, museums, and businesses, among others. Although logic models exist to describe how SLEs can make positive…

The Community of Inquiry (CoI) framework posits that a collaborative online teaching and learning process can be achieved through three interdependent dimensions of presence: cognitive presence, social presence, and teaching presence. Emotion is considered an important factor in successful online learning. This study explored non-traditional…