School districts across the United States have been plagued with teacher attrition for nearly a decade. While this fact has been well documented, a sustainable solution has yet to be discovered. Many studies have been conducted to determine the causes for teacher attrition yet few address possibilities to aid in teacher retention. In an attempt to…

Teacher change is at the heart of school reform. The research on teacher change has been primarily focused on teacher change from an individualistic perspective and has identified three possible paths of teacher change: beliefs precede change, change precedes beliefs, or change is nonlinear and recursive. This study looked at teacher change within…

Many school systems across the United States have begun redesign efforts by investing in smaller high school settings (Cawelti, 1999). Transforming schools into structured academic or career-themed academies has been associated with increased student achievement and more personalized learning environments. Ongoing collaboration of district level…

Relentless reform and increased accountability in education in England have led to increasing attention on the effectiveness of teachers' professional development (PD). A shift away from top-down approaches to PD has led to more emphasis placed on in-house, collaborative models. This paper reports on qualitative research conducted in the south of…

Superintendents have the responsibility to engage in the act of teaching their colleagues what they have learned about the most important work of school districts--ensuring high student achievement. They also must provide strong leadership that will foster and nurture powerful learning communities.

This article is about the informal learning that took place in an online divorce support and advice forum. In it, the author discusses the formation of a community of practice among the members during the first nine months of the site's operation. The author shows how the key markers of mutual engagement, joint enterprise and shared repertoire…

This article reports on a review of empirical research published in selected higher education journals in 2008, which was focused on examining how often theories are developed through research. This review found relatively little evidence of theory development. Drawing on the notions of internal and external languages of description, it is argued…

In this Viewpoint, we aim to raise questions about the positioning of teachers and teacher knowledge in professional development networks. We contend that diverse purposes across professional development configurations labeled "networks" have been glossed over in the literature, obscuring important questions about teacher learning and its role in…

In the UK, as elsewhere in the world, the global financial crisis has focused attention on the cost of public services and the need to reduce expenditure, not least in respect of higher education. This, however, raises a set of prior questions: What kind of society do we want? What is important to democratic society? What kind of higher education…

This article highlights some of the obstacles facing tenure-track faculty of color in academia. Through the perspective of Critical Race Theory (CRT) and by using a counterstories method, four faculty of color share their experiences as they explore diversity issues through engaging in a 1-year self-study. Findings of this qualitative study…

In order to bring teaching and research together, a fuller understanding of how academics conceptualise research and scholarship is needed. The paper discusses different ways in which research and scholarship are conceptualised and then provides two alternative models of the relationship between teaching and research based on different conceptions…

Students' online communications provide an engaging platform for discussing audience, purpose, and voice. Digitalk allows teens to experiment, to make decisions that are tied to audience, purpose, and voice. If teens have the opportunity to step back from their digital writing, to see value in the choices they make, and to see themselves as…

This article presents analysed data from the first year of the Rural Teacher Education Project (RTEP 2007-2009) with a view to illustrating how a generative theory of rurality as education research was developed, and for which ends it might be utilised. The article suggests that data from projects in rural communities, which take the rural as…

This article discusses some of the consequences of collectivization and subsequent privatization of handicraft in China in the second half of the 20th century on ways of learning and modes of apprenticeship. It argues that, after the privatization of the ceramics workshops of Dingshu, Jiangsu province, an ethos of sharing previously introduced by…

The outdated manner in which we operate schools is tied to a reality that no longer exists. The society for which we prepare our students has shifted from a factory to a learning organization model. If we hope to prepare our graduates for successful participation in learning organizations we must transform both the structure and culture of our…