In this article, the author offers an appreciation of the writers and their books that have shaped her teaching and thinking. Her face-to-face encounters with these books prompted her to question her own beliefs about literacy, about authority, about language, about writing, about literature. She was surrounded by the living animations of the…

No moment of teaching is an island, entire of itself. Every move the author makes, every decision to speak or keep silent, every utterance emerges out of a larger ongoing professional conversation, as unfinished now as it was a hundred years ago when that first "English Journal" ("EJ") appeared. His specific moves as a teacher are turns at talk in…

How does the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) help teachers and students foster cultural memory? In this article, the author underscores three areas of NCTE that have facilitated the integration of his experiences and cultural background into his teaching mission. First, NCTE has published groundbreaking research in this area: most…

Through the process of initiating, implementing, and sustaining a schoolwide professional learning community (PLC), teachers and administrators at the pseudonymous Silver Valley Middle School provide a powerful example of distributed leadership in action. New leadership roles, coordination, and interdependency among staff have led to an increased…

Leadership by teachers is essential to serving the needs of students, schools, and the teaching profession. To that end, the Teacher Leadership Exploratory Consortium has developed Teacher Leader Model Standards to codify, promote, and support teacher leadership as a vehicle to transform schools for the needs of the 21st century. The Teacher…

Given the complex environment in which the U.S. military operates, leaders at all levels must be prepared for a force that is more responsive to regional combatant commanders needs, better employs joint capabilities, facilitates force packaging and rapid deployment, and fights self contained units in non-linear, non-contiguous battle space. This…

The lesson study model of professional development that originated in Japan is becoming increasingly popular in the United States. At its core, lesson study is a means of bringing teachers together to carry out the process of planning a lesson, implementing and observing it, and then examining it during a debriefing session. The debriefing…

During the late 1980s and early 1990s further and higher education in the UK and Australia underwent restructuring, bringing institutional mergers and the transformation of institutes of technology and colleges of education into "new" universities. Vocational fields, including the creative arts and industries of design and film, came…

The integration of care and education across pre-school sectors of several European countries is currently a key policy priority. In England this necessitates reform aimed at re-modelling a traditionally hierarchical and divided workforce. Drawing on research with early years professionals, this article explores the micro-politics of reform with a…

Connectivism is receiving acknowledgement as a fresh way of conceptualising learning in the digital age. Thus, as a relatively new instructional framework, it is imperative that research on its applicability and effectiveness in a variety of educational contexts is advanced. In particular, a high premium should be placed on context-specific…

Teacher study groups are often thought to be effective professional development structures. Such teacher communities may foster teacher learning through a collaborative culture and the codification of group members' collective knowledge. However, not all study groups are effective professional development. This article is a discussion of factors…

In the past 3 decades, the concept of professional community has gained considerable momentum in the theoretical and empirical studies in this field. At the same time, the concept has faced conceptual and methodological difficulties in that as yet no universal definition has been formulated and that its operationalization differs in the various…

In this article we report results of a qualitative interview study focusing on middle school Language Arts teachers' perceptions, attitudes, and reported practices related to LGBQ topics. The study found that virtually all of the teacher participants recognized that the topic of same-sex sexuality was important for their students, yet the teachers…

New special education teachers (SETs) face some typical challenges as well as ones that are specific to their particular work settings. Providing support that addresses teachers' unique needs is important for increasing their effectiveness, helping them make a smooth entry into teaching, and reducing their stress and turnover. Nearly 20 years ago,…

This study investigated the relationships between a professional learning community (PLC), faculty trust in colleagues, teachers' collective efficacy, and their commitment to students. The findings from exploratory factor analysis indicated that three clear components could be extracted from the scale of Professional Learning Communities…