This study was designed to initiate the process of building professional development learning communities for pre-service math teachers through revealing those teachers' conceptions/beliefs of students' learning and their own learning in China. It examines Chinese pre-service math teachers' conceptions of student learning and their related…

Computer Science (CS) curricula are being adopted worldwide. However, the lack of prior teaching training within this area means that we have an urgent need to provide teacher professional development. Best practice teacher professional development motivates us to construct interactive and sustainable models of professional development. However,…

This one-year long ethnographic case study seeks to add to the body of literature on EFL teachers' identities in Colombia by drawing on ethnographic methods and sociocultural theories to examine the identity construction of four EFL teachers at the university level. Specifically, this study explores how EFL teachers' identities shaped and were…

A study of teacher metacognition within the context of the professional learning community (PLC) was conducted to understand how teachers describe their metacognition, what they describe as the catalysts to their metacognition, and how metacognition influences their work. Although the PLC was used as a context for the study, the findings include…

Professional Learning Communties (PLCs) school reform movement that is grounded in decades of research. The purpose of this research was to investigate whether or not a PLC would help in cultivating a culture of learning and collaboration at a small charter school in Delaware. The research involved interviews of teachers, administrators and a data…

Determining effective change that leads to sustainable improved student achievement remains an elusive goal for most educational communities. This research addresses the question of what factors of professional development promote sustained change within a school organization. The survey questions focus on the formation of professional learning…

This report summarizes select results for items pertaining to Professional Learning Communities (PLCs), teacher collaboration, instructional practice, and teacher planning from the 2010-2011 and 2011-2012 Teaching, Empowering, Leading and Learning (TELL) AISD Working Conditions and the 2011-2012 Employee Coordinated (ECS) surveys.

The diffusion of innovation is critical to societal progression. In the field of education, such diffusion takes on added significance because of the many stakeholders and accountabilities involved. This article presents the argument that efforts at diffusion which are designed from a top-down perspective are not sustainable over the long term…

A major discovery, or rediscovery, of this time is that an education that matters--an education that enhances capacities and expands outlooks--is one that engages the whole student. Research in learning has shown that making sense of the world and learning to use knowledge and skills in responsible and engaged ways--long the developmental goals of…

The design, delivery and assessment of a complete educational scheme, such as a degree programme or a professional qualification course, is a complex matter. Maintaining alignment between the stated aims of the curriculum and the scoring of student achievement is an overarching concern. The potential for drift across individual aspects of an…

ePortfolio integrates technology with a student's academic course work and have increasingly become an integral part of higher education curriculum. They allow students to showcase their academic work in a fresh way on a digital platform. Traditionally, however, ePortfolio is implemented from a single discipline approach. This project aimed to…

This article describes the results of a qualitative multiple case study investigation of the experiences of preservice teachers during a teaching practicum in Hong Kong. The study uses in-depth interviews with pairs of student teachers and their school-based supporting teachers to understand how the former positioned themselves as particular types…

Background: Research indicates that some youth sport coaches have specific strategies in their coaching plan to facilitate positive youth development (PYD) while others struggle in articulating how they promote the development of their athletes in actual practice. These variations can be largely attributed to the fact that coaching is a complex…

This paper is a commentary to a paper by Anne Solli, Frank Bach and Björn Åkerman on how students at a technical university learn to argue as biotechnologists. Solli and her colleagues report from an ethnographic study performed during the first semester of a 5-year program in biotechnology at a technical university in Sweden. Their study…

Teachers and students face many challenges in shifting from traditional classroom cultures to enacting the "Knowledge-Building Communities" model (KBC model) supported by the CSCL environment, "Knowledge Forum" (Bereiter, 2002; Bereiter & Scardamalia, 1993; Scardamalia, 2002; Scardamalia & Bereiter, 2006). Enacting the…