Social networking sites have become such a common part of human culture that educators use them daily--whether it's to post a quick personal update, tweet a thought or great link, or blog to their students about an upcoming assignment. The National Association of Agricultural Educators (NAAE) has taken that concept a step further, however, by…

At our University, the Faculty of Health, Social Care and Education has delivered a variety of undergraduate and postgraduate courses via flexible distance learning for many years. Distance learning can be a lonely experience for students who may feel isolated and unsupported. However e-learning provides an opportunity to use technology to…

Recent research suggests that personal and institutional constraints often limit the degree to which professional development impacts teaching practice. Darling-Hammond suggests that one of those constraints is time in schools for collaborative planning. She cites high performing schools in Europe and Asia that have three to four times more…

To meet accountability demands, principals are being encouraged to enhance schools' organizational capacities by distributing leadership and initiating professional communities. Yet, relatively little attention has focused on how to develop the capabilities of potential co-leaders, and professional communities can be difficult to initiate and…

To assume the role of technology leaders and information literacy specialists in their schools, librarians need access to the most current information. And, they do this by helping each other. There are many definitions, but professional learning networks (PLNs) involve sharing work-related ideas with a network of colleagues via various digital…

This paper investigates the concept of online learning community (OLC) to address the issues of teacher professional development practice in twenty-first-century Indonesia. Teachers in Indonesia are trained in a "conventional way", hence, not ready to prepare the younger generations for entrance into the twenty-first-century complex life…

Actor network theory (ANT) is used to explore how work-learning is enacted in informal online communities and illustrates how researchers might use sociomaterial approaches to uncover complexities, uncertainties, and specificities of work-learning practices. Participants in this study were self-employed workers. The relational and material aspects…

This paper presents findings from a larger, qualitative study that explored the potential of a school-based teacher community of practice as a model for a transformative form of teacher professional development. This paper reports on initial findings from a grounded theory exploration of the factors that facilitated and constrained the evolution…

Student voice is a key component in constructing discourses of respect, empowerment and citizenship in schools. It can help schools to become learning communities, rather than knowledge factories, that serve the needs of the majority of their members, the students, as successfully as possible and prepare them for future lives in a wide variety of…

This article describes a method--Collaborative Civics Conference Protocol (3CP)--that teachers can use with any civics education program to engage students in meaningful collaborative assessment of each others' thinking and writing and to make connections between civics activities and essential social studies content. Borrowing from the Writer's…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to provide a theoretical discussion of a developing epistemology and methodology for a qualitative study of participants of enterprise education in south-west Ireland, run collaboratively between third level academics, a regional development agency, and entrepreneurs. Design/methodology/approach: The…

Socrates argued that the unexamined life is not worth living. For the past decade, the authors--along with many colleagues, organizations, and commercial firms--have been immersed in the booming, buzzing confusion that is the community landscape of higher education. They have communities that build software (e.g., Jasig, Kuali, Moodle, Sakai),…

This article presents a method for addressing the self-selection bias of students who participate in learning communities (LCs). More specifically, this research utilizes equivalent comparison groups based on selected incoming characteristics of students, known as bootstraps, to account for self-selection bias. To address the differences in…

Changing teacher practices to improve student learning is a challenge. For teachers' practices to change, faculties within schools must build communities of practice. However, supporting teachers' collaborative learning within a Professional Learning Team can be an elusive challenge. We found through the Instructional Learning Team (ILT) model of…

This study supports the work of Black and Wiliam (1998), who demonstrated that when teachers effectively utilize formative assessment strategies, student learning increases significantly. However, the researchers also found a "poverty of practice" among teachers, in that few fully understood how to implement classroom formative…