The purpose of this study is to shed light on the ways in which experts in foreign affairs project their scholarly identities on panel presentations. While previous research has focused on the ways in which researchers in various disciplines assert their scholarly identities in written discourse and in conference presentations, no study has…

In order to create a greater abundance of effective and affordable pathways for low-income learners, the Institute for Educational Leadership (IEL) created Minds That Move Us (MTMU). MTMU challenges the bright minds of communities around the country to design innovative education and training models that create social equity and economic mobility…

As the modern learning community movement turns 30, it is time to determine just how many, and what type, of these programs exist at America's colleges and universities. This article first offers a rationale for counting learning communities followed by a description of how disparate counts and unclear definitions hamper efforts to embed these…

The Curious Schools project is a teacher professional learning initiative that aims to provide an insight into--and resource for--creativity in Tasmanian schools. It offers an alternative to conventional models of teacher professional learning by engaging teachers in multi-modal methods of documenting and reflecting on their work as the basis for…

The continuous generation and evolution of digital learning resources is important for promoting open learning and meeting the personalized needs of learners. In the Web 2.0 era, open and collaborative authoring is becoming a popular method by which to create vast personalized learning resources in open knowledge communities (OKCs). However, the…

Emerging from the contested site of a new university campus, this article reflects on the transformative process of reconceptualizing and rebuilding a professional and an academic stream in a 21st-century Faculty of Education. In order to maximize her own capital, an assistant professor sought tenure in an innovative new stream introduced to her…

Ask educators what they need for their own learning, and more time to collaborate with colleagues generally ranks high on the list. Educators know that when they encounter specific student learning or instructional challenges, their peers typically have insights and solutions that will be helpful. Every school has an enormous body of expertise,…

Field experiences are important components of undergraduate music teacher education programs. This applied qualitative study investigated 12 preservice music teachers' reactions to K-12 field experiences for an undergraduate instrumental music methods course. Six weeks of course discussion board posts were analyzed via an iterative, constant…

Teacher professional development (PD) that supports the emergence of professional learning communities (PLCs) is effective for teachers' learning and instructional improvement. Our work focuses on supporting the emergence of online PLCs and an emergent issue in this work is how to maintain the quality of teachers' experiences in online PLCs when…

Lesson Study is a professional development program, which engages teachers in a collaborative and long-term lesson planning process aimed at improving a single or a group of lessons. In the process, teachers may feel that they are offered three different types of support: social, emotional, and instructional. The purpose of this study was to…

Drawing on Lave & Wenger's concept of situated learning and Apple's premise that daily interactions at school construct what is considered legitimate knowledge, this article examines the discourses of teaching and learning circulating among students. Through interviews and open-ended, online surveys, we trace how nine different discourses of…

Background: Teachers can have a significant impact on student interest and learning in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) subjects and careers. Teacher self-efficacy can also significantly affect student learning. Researchers investigated the effects of teacher professional development and integrated STEM curriculum development on…

Student learning communities (SLCs) are more than just a different way of doing group work. Like the professional learning communities they resemble, SLCs provide students with a structured way to solve problems, share insight, and help one another continually develop new skills and expertise. With the right planning and support, dynamic…

This volume provides a comprehensive and contemporary depiction of the swift evolution of learning technologies and the innovations that derive from their deployment in school education. It comprises cases studies, research focused on emergent technologies and experiments with existing tools in a wide range of scenarios. The studies included in…

Research reports teachers around the world currently face major challenges to their professional agency. They face numerous pressures from accountability measures operating in the highly politicised field of literacy education and standardised testing. At the same time international research encourages teachers to design rich assessment tasks…