When teachers who deeply understand the needs of their students and colleagues lead professional learning in their schools, everyone benefits. In this article, five educators and their perspectives on teacher leadership are featured. These educators have all taught low-income urban children in elementary grades for several years, but in different…

Building on the rich faculty development literature worldwide, recent scholarship on the advancement, professionalism, and career paths of individuals entering the field has received greater attention. Through focus group discussions, faculty developers from colleges and universities around the world shared their pathways into and through faculty…

As a result of Race to the Top, states across the country vied for school improvement grants in order to advance educational reforms including effective professional development and teacher collaboration within their school districts. Requirements of the grant included the development of teacher evaluation systems and a professional development…

Network building vitally impacts career development, but in few professions does it impact daily practice more than in teaching. Teacher networks, known as professional learning communities, communities of practice, peer learning circles, virtual professional communities, as well as other names, play a unique and powerful role in education. In…

In contrast to the myth of the "Digital Native" and the ubiquity of Facebook use, we have found that students' digital identities are predominantly social with their online activity beyond Facebook limited to being social media consumers rather than producers. Within a global economy students need to learn new digital literacy skills to…

Whereas most articles in this special issue demonstrate careful and close-up views of Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) in a performing arts or humanities discipline, my approach is opposite; I look in on music teaching and learning to interrogate current conceptions of SoTL. I begin with Sloboda's cognitive explanation of music…

Colleges and universities across the United States are still enrolling students who are underprepared for college-level courses of study. Tinto (1998) stated at the Conference on Replacing Remediation in Higher Education: "Students are entering college with no more than a sixth-grade education in basic skills such as reading, writing, and…

Teams are ubiquitous in schools in the 21st Century; yet training for effective teaming within these settings has lagged behind. The authors of this article developed 5 modules, grounded in the science of team training and adapted from an evidence-based curriculum used in medical settings called TeamSTEPPS®, to prepare instructional and…

The purpose of this article is to describe both our unique training under Don Hellison and how the TPSR Alliance has played an important role in helping us navigate our academic careers. Both of us studied under Don Hellison for several years at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC). While Dave began working with Don as an undergraduate with…

The authors focus on a collective biography of 12 women social work educators, all either tenured or in tenure lines, from five different universities at the time of the study. The participants represent several aspects of macro practice including administration, planning, community practice, and policy. Beginning with reflections about coming…

The advent of Twitter® and other social media services of its type ushered in a new era of professional development in education. This article addresses how a group of users have been employing Twitter to conduct professional development sessions that would benefit their participants by advancing their pedagogical approaches to learning and…

The immediate drivers to increase publication outputs in higher education are government and research funding, organisational status, performance expectations and personal career aspirations. Writing retreats are one of a range of strategies used by universities to boost publication output. The aims of this integrative review were to synthesise…

This 4-year case study used a photo-elicitation approach to language learning history research in an individual case study of an Indonesian student's experiences of communities of practice while studying abroad in Japan. The study showed how the student's opportunities for interaction in Japanese were at first limited by his peripheral…

This article aims to discuss young deaf children's access to literacy within a sociocultural perspective. We introduce the concept of communities of practice as an aspect in early literacy development for young deaf children. Preschools are learning communities and thus constitute communities of practice. Our discussion on the use of communities…

In this article, we explore how organizational routines involving instructional rounds--collective, structured observations and reflections on classroom practice--might contribute to the development of social networks among administrators and support a common, district-wide focus on instruction. Building on work on communities of practice, we…