The Colorado Graduates Initiative demonstrates seven factors that must be present to build an effective statewide collaborative effort to increase high school graduation rates. These include: 1) Leadership to unite diverse stakeholders on specific, common goals and catalyze them into action; 2) A focus on data, particularly on actionable, early…

The purpose of this paper is to explore a teacher professional development program embedded in a networked learning environment, and to offer an emerging model and analytic matrix of 21st century teacher professional development. The Globaloria program is based on theories of learning by design and facilitates teachers and students as they create…

This paper explores the forces that support the proliferation of the flexible work arrangement called job sharing. Moreover, the paper will illuminate the need for integrating learning and practice as a way to develop and support job sharing partners, or "Partners in Practice" (PiPs). The author puts forth a model derived from learning in…

Intentional communities--groups of unrelated individuals who choose to live together, sharing such things in common as wealth, property, labour, food and a sense of identity and fellowship (Kamau 2002)--continue to serve as powerful points of resistance to the larger culture of consumption that permeates our modern world. Grounded in recent…

Learning communities can trace their origins to the 1920s and the experimental College at the University of Wisconsin, but the widespread use of learning communities to improve undergraduate education is a relatively new phenomenon. The early learning communities of the late 1980s and early 1990s consisted of groups of new freshmen co-enrolled in…

The purpose of this proposed research study is to empirically explore the nature of virtual communities of practice (CoP) in a global organisation within the context of its International Corporate Volunteer (ICV) Program. This study investigates whether and how the use of virtual CoP evolves and becomes embedded within this organization. Following…

Over the course of the last several decades, K-12 educational systems have begun to adopt digital technologies to support teaching and learning. These tools have enabled the rise of online schools as well as fundamentally changing practices of school leadership. However little attention has been given to how instructional leadership is changed…

This quantitative study examined the effects of a New Hampshire Department of Education policy, Ed 512. This mandated state policy was designed to influence local district leadership to facilitate the development of Professional Learning Communities (PLCs) at the school level with the goal of improving instruction in the classroom. For this study…

A local concern has been the effectiveness of school improvement efforts such as professional learning communities (PLCs) on student achievement. The results of this study are necessary as policy makers, school districts, administrators, and teachers aim to increase student achievement and the effectiveness of PLCs. The purpose of this study was…

This paper examines discourses of creativity in English-language education in post-colonial Hong Kong, where educational reform has mandated a change from transmissive to interactive modes of teaching and learning and a shift towards more creative methods of teaching English. The literature is reviewed with regard to discourses of creativity both…

Studying a foreign language at university level is a multifaceted project entailing constant identity formation as a foreign language user--and simultaneously as a plurilingual subject. As far as the second language (L2) learner is concerned, the language learning process can be seen as a construction of a new "third place" between the…

The purpose of this study was to gain an understanding of the perceptions of underprepared college students who had participated in a first-year learning community at an urban, culturally diverse, commuter campus in the southeastern United States. Perceptions of graduates and those who earned at least 30 college-level credit hours were compared to…

Connecting discipline scholars with the scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL) is accepted as an essential part of professional academic practice across the higher education sector irrespective of discipline. To connect meaningfully with teaching practice, SoTL needs to be translated by the discipline scholar and narratives related to the…

This study demonstrates the potential for collaborative research among participants in local settings to effect positive change in urban settings characterized by diversity. It describes an interpretive case study of a racially, ethnically, and socioeconomically diverse eighth grade science classroom in an urban magnet school in order to explore…

Explicit training in teaming skills (both preservice and inservice) has been identified as a key means of facilitating the effective functioning of teaching teams (Main, 2007). This case study explored how groupwork tasks within university coursework can prepare preservice education students to work effectively in teaching teams. Three students in…