The quest for effective teaching remains a demanding, complex and daunting task. In spite of the wealth of research evidence on the nature of effective and ineffective teaching, there are still problems about spelling out what effective teaching really is. Most research efforts aim at investigating teacher effectiveness by probing the following…

"Iranian Journal of Language Studies" ("IJLS") is a quarterly journal devoted to all areas of language and linguistics. Its aim is to present work of current interest in all areas of language study. No particular linguistic theories or scientific trends are favored: scientific quality and scholarly standing are the only…

This article reports on the results of a mixed method case study investigating the relationship between professional learning community (PLC) activities and teacher improvement in a first-year middle school. Data were collected from core academic sixth, seventh, and eighth grade teachers using a professional development survey, teacher interviews,…

This article brings together an overview of ideas about teacher learning from both teacher education and workplace learning literature, and examines what and how newly qualified secondary school teachers learn in the early years of their career. We discuss the types of knowledge new teachers encounter and present a typology of teacher learning.…

Northern Ireland has invested heavily in the use of technology enhanced learning at all levels of education. Alongside this, radical changes to the school curriculum and the planned move away from academic selection towards a more inclusive system are challenging those involved in Initial Teacher Education to find ways to improve teaching and…

In this classic essay, first published by the "Harvard Educational Review" in 1986, Vivian Gussin Paley details the beginnings of her career as a teacher and author. The article describes her methods of tape-recording and analyzing her students' daily engagement in the "three Fs: fantasy, fairness, and friendship." Her careful analysis provides…

Standard-driven curriculum, evidence of learning through assessment, meaningful performance outcomes, and the growing diversity of student populations are transforming how inclusion is implemented and evaluated. To provide all students with a quality instructional program that meets individual educational needs in the context of political and…

This paper describes a collaborative action research approach used to explore peer observation of teaching (POT) within the online environment. Although POT has become familiar in face-to-face teaching contexts, little is understood of its potential role in online settings. We conducted "virtual" focus groups to explore the experience…

This book follows master educator Elizabeth (Betty) Jones as she teaches an introductory course in early childhood education. She actively engages the students, encouraging them to make decisions, ask questions, and engage in collaborative problem solving--herself modeling the behaviors that should be practiced by adults working with young…

This research is an examination of how gender is constructed through the pedagogical practices of the teacher in one secondary English/literacy classroom. It is evident from the classroom data that the teacher talks to the male students and the female students very differently and in this way constructs gender in different and inequitable ways.…

Guidance and verbal directions, usually received in a face-to-face (F2F) classroom, are often conspicuously absent from online courses. Like their peers in traditional classroom settings, students in online classes need clear, concise instructions (Cramer, Collins, Snider, & Fawcett, 2006). Screen capture and recording technologies, such as…

Words Work! and Community Action Head Start have been working together for seven years to provide training, consultation, mentoring, and resources to teachers in pilot classrooms as they learned to implement effective early literacy strategies. In its work with teachers, Words Work! developed a culture "where ongoing assessment, reflective…

The powerful role of prior experiences and cultural schemata in guiding novice teachers' conceptions of how to teach is hardly contested. We report on a "reflective practicum" at the very beginning of a pre-service teacher education course that interconnects prior beliefs, reflection-in-action and reflection-on-action and that, in principle,…

This study chronicles a 2-year school wide portfolio initiative in a British elementary school, teacher resistance to the initiative, and factors that contributed to acceptance of the portfolio initiative. Critical components to teacher engagement in this context included teacher ownership of the process and product, a child-centred focus to the…

This paper comments on strengths and weaknesses of the papers on communities of practice in this special issue of "Technology, Pedagogy and Education." First it discusses the character of communities of practice and the question of whether schools are environments that are conducive to the development of teacher communities of practice. It then…