With the permeation of the Internet in teachers' personal and professional lives, teachers are going online to connect, share ideas and expand their learning opportunities. This qualitative study focuses on the use of digital applications that leverage opportunities for teachers in the design phase, that is, at the time they are developing and…

Following educational reform in Israel, teacher-leaders create and lead professional development communities (PDCs), which are professional learning communities with a focus on in-service professional development and/or improving pedagogical effectiveness. Interviews with 30 teacher-leaders and all four district-level program coordinators revealed…

Social networking sites provide opportunities for informal and social learning of academic practices in higher education, yet not all academics engage in these spaces. This qualitative study suggests that while Twitter offers informal opportunities for academic development, inhibiting factors prevent staff from establishing their social presence…

Community colleges are increasingly important places for language minority students to access higher education. Unfortunately, this group of students is the least likely to persist in terms of re-enrollment, degree completion, or transfer to four-year institutions. In this study, we used structured equation modeling with a sample of 10,637…

This study investigated the use of Facebook as a medium for, and process of, teachers' informal professional learning regarding mathematical and pedagogical knowledge. Facebook responses to four inter-related posts about mathematics examples from Facebook users (N = 117) were captured and systematically analysed using content analysis. The data…

The number of English Learners (ELs) is growing across the United States, yet research indicates that teachers are not receiving enough professional development specifically focused on serving ELs (de Jong & Harper 2005). Teacher leader roles which incorporate both EL program management and supporting teachers in addressing the challenges of…

This article focuses on an ethical tension in a community of philosophical inquiry with children and young adults; the resolution that the author suggests is called "enabling identity." The "enabling identity" model seeks to endow a voice to children and adolescents from marginalized groups by challenging the mainstream…

Driven 2 Teach is a privately funded program for history teachers in the state of Utah. The program emphasizes the importance of teacher travel to educate history teachers in the places where history happened. This study investigated the program's influence on participant gains in learning about history and how to best teach about the past, social…

Amidst the growing trend toward the use of yoga and mindfulness in K-12 classrooms, there has been an emphasis in research on the use of mindfulness as a tool for supporting the learning and behavioral needs of children. Educators, school leaders, school counselors and mental health workers are implementing mindfulness and yoga as activities and…

This dissertation unveils the identity formation and negotiation processes of teacher candidates, through their practice with English Language Learners (ELLs) in a field-based teacher preparation program. Identity, like learning, is socially constructed and continuously negotiated by someone's engagement in a community (Wenger, 1998). Thus,…

Cross-community collaboration which expands community members' interaction to a larger social scale plays a crucial role in increasing information exchange and extending inquiry learning. This dissertation uses a design-based research approach which aims at testing a multi-level emergence design in multiple learning communities. This design serves…

In recent years in England there has been a move away from Initial Teacher Training (ITT) taking place predominantly in Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) to becoming schools led. The two main routes undertaken by graduates wishing to teach are the Post Graduate Certificate of Education (PGCE) and Schools Direct (SD). Both routes offer…

This paper describes a new assessment tool that situates school literacy as a specific cognitive, cultural, social and emotional. It reports evidence of the extent to which this tool seems to have helped student teachers to broker and balance different kinds of data and knowledge flows. The study shows that the tool was helpful in encouraging…

There is a growing understanding of the unique ways that tabletops support effective collaboration; however, this research mostly focuses on environments in which learners work towards a single shared goal. Underpinning this perspective, either implicitly or explicitly, is the theory that collaborative learning is a process of attaining convergent…

This work explores how mindful leadership practice can inform school and district leadership specifically as it occurs in professional learning communities (PLC). When school and district leaders create PLC cultures that encourage rich thinking and intentional practice, individual and organizational mindfulness is present. As leaders work to craft…