Educational reform efforts are necessary for state and local educational agencies to prepare students to meet the demands of the 21st century and to follow federal and state education laws. In efforts to support low-performing schools, education officials have concentrated educational reform on replicating the characteristics of high-performing…

As trained leaders for whom accountability and a strong work ethic are second nature, Chicagoland veterans are uniquely equipped to meet the demands of today's jobs. That veterans typically possess the skills and character needed to excel in the civilian workplace makes reports on the state of veteran unemployment more troubling. Through the…

Teacher professional learning is of increasing interest as one way to support the increasingly complex skills students need to succeed in the 21st century. However, many teacher professional development initiatives appear ineffective in supporting changes in teacher practices and student learning. To identify the features of effective professional…

Teacher professional learning is of increasing interest as one way to support the increasingly complex skills students need to learn in preparation for further education and work in the 21st century. Sophisticated forms of teaching are needed to develop student competencies such as deep mastery of challenging content, critical thinking, complex…

There is a growing recognition among researchers and practitioners alike that student-athletes are an "at risk" group of students in higher education today. More specifically, research has identified several specific negative conditions that impact student-athletes and threaten their success in college. Learning communities, on the other…

In this autoethnographic study, the authors/subjects examined retrospective reflections (narratives) on their experiences within an ePortfolio community of practice to help them understand the conditions that led to transformations in their teaching. The theoretical framework of situated learning and cognitive mediation was used to explore this…

The world is becoming increasingly one multicultural Global village and business and education transnational, which implies that students will need to recognize, accept, and adjust to cultural differences in communications to succeed in their studies as well as in their future careers. This presentation is fundamentally about a niftier way of…

This article poses a model for developing a book club to promote praxis. This model is built upon a basic four step framework for developing book clubs and includes specific recommendations to focus the book club on reflection of theory and how to incorporate it into practice. This model will be used to start a book club examining Continuous…

As a new teacher, what will you do when you realize there is an aspect of your practice that you want to improve? Will you make a plea to your administration to attend an expensive workshop? Will you try to cram a class into your already jam-packed schedule? You may even try to hide your weakness and hope nobody notices. Is there another option to…

This article represents an attempt to more fully understand the interactions of individuals in a specific community of practice on the World Wide Web. It attempts to answer questions about whether norms of participation and learning developed over time have been established in this virtual community of practice. It also explores how the perceived…

The integrated curriculum has been and still remains one of the major directions of interest in contemporary education. The present study aims at analyzing the opinion of a sample of 108 teachers, which are part of an eTwinning community regarding: a) their availability to participate in eTwinning projects; b) the ways of capitalizing the results…

The increasing availability of concept inventories and other assessment tools in the molecular life sciences provides instructors with myriad avenues to probe student understanding. For example, although molecular visualization is central to the study of biochemistry, a growing body of evidence suggests that students have substantial limitations…

This paper outlines an initiative, namely a leadership symposium, which developed from a chance meeting of like-minded academics, who were trying to achieve similar outcomes with their student groups; namely, to include the scholarly activity of disseminating graduates' action-oriented projects. One group of graduates comprised a mix of…

During their teaching practicum future teachers become acquainted with the rights, duties and obligations of their profession in their trajectory of building a teaching identity. In this process, they go through a number of critical incidents, where we observe that student teachers struggle to integrate the meaning of these incidents with their…

This mixed-method study examines Arizona principals' capacity-building skills and practices in Tier III schools aimed at developing potential for sustained improvements in student outcomes. Data sources included surveys (62 individuals) and semistructured interviews (29 individuals) of principals and staff (e.g. teachers, instructional coaches,…