The development of teacher professional learning communities (PLC) has attracted growing attention among practitioners, policy-makers and researchers. The aims of this study were to identify typologies of professional learning teams based on measures of professional learning engagement, and assess their linkages with teachers' value orientations.…

We examined how social network (SN) groups contribute to the learning of chemistry. The main goal was to determine whether chemistry learning could occur in the group discourse. The emphasis was on groups of students in the 11th and 12th grades who learn chemistry in preparation for their final external examination. A total of 1118 discourse…

Extension staff are increasingly challenged to do excellent work and balance their lives. University of Maine Cooperative Extension committed to a 2-year participatory action research project to support staff and to an organizational climate that encourages personal sustainability. With tools from ethnography and appreciative inquiry, staff…

This article reflects on the landscape of ICT-mediated learning research in Singapore schools over the past 12 years. This ICT (information and communications technology) journey is situated in the context of the Singapore education Masterplans and the inception of substantive research funding in this area of work since 2003. The article questions…

This research aimed to analyse the induction experiences of preservice mathematics teachers during their school placements through the lens of communities of practice. The main research question was concerned with how preservice mathematics teachers perceive what constitutes the practice of a professional community of mathematics teachers. A…

The teaching practices of recognizing and responding to students' ideas during instruction are often called formative assessment, and can be conceptualized by four abilities: designing formative assessment tasks, asking questions to elicit student thinking, interpreting student ideas, and providing feedback that moves student thinking forward.…

This quantitative study investigated and compared the development of professional learning communities in schools located in two Chinese cities, namely, Shanghai and Mianyang. The two cities have significant differences in terms of educational, economic, social, and cultural development. While Shanghai is a directly controlled municipality in East…

The concept of situation awareness is essential in enhancing collaborative learning. Learners require information from different awareness aspects to deduce a learning situation for decision-making. Designing learning environments that assist learners to understand situation awareness via monitoring actions and reaction of other learners has been…

While composition studies researchers have examined the ways social media are impacting our lives inside and outside of the classroom, less attention has been given to the ways in which social media--specifically Social Network Sites (SNSs)--may enhance our own research methods and methodologies by helping to combat research participant attrition…

This article contributes to the literature on connectivism, connectivist MOOCs (cMOOCs) and rhizomatic learning by examining participant interactions, community formation and nomadic learner behavior in a particular cMOOC, #rhizo15, facilitated for 6 weeks by Dave Cormier. It further focuses on what we can learn by observing Twitter interactions…

The ubiquity of online programs in higher education requires continued focus on designing instructional environments that improve students' learning. We examine students' perceptions of sense of community and learning, as well as academic achievement, using grades obtained from a final project and participation in asynchronous discussion forums.…

In this article, we present three models of teacher preparation programs that immersed their candidates in experiential learning aimed at bringing together theory and practice. We identify the key components that can be generalized from studying such programs, examine factors that led to their dismantling, and propose a potentially more…

Models of response to intervention (RtI) are being widely implemented in schools across the country in order to increase effective teaching and remove barriers to student learning. The implementation of RtI is greatly facilitated when teachers and staff see themselves as a professional learning community (PLC). This article begins with an…

Lesson Study as a growing interest in the education world has attracted educators, experts, and professionals in the area to make use of it in improving the lessons--it also happens in Indonesia. Originally applied in the teaching of mathematics in Japan, now it turns to be used in other fields, and English is one of them. This paper highlights…

This "Practices from the Field" article describes the rationale and operationalization of an interdisciplinary team-taught first-year inquiry seminar and learning community program at a large predominantly White research institution. The authors both serve as faculty members in the College of Education and Human Development and teach in…