The past decade has seen increasing international education activity and interest from policymakers and think tanks in looking to other countries for educational reform strategies. This "new isomorphism"--the notion of global best practices in education--has been the subject of intensive debate between advocates and critics. But missing…

Systems thinking involves attempts to understand and improve complex systems, examines systems holistically, and focuses on the way that a system's constituent parts interrelate. This essay provides examples of how systems thinking can enable principals to demonstrate instructional leadership and nurture learning-focused schools in the current era…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to focus on professional learning communities (PLCs) run for and by teachers to achieve their ongoing professional development and greater pupil attainment. The paper examined principals' perceptions of how such PLCs influence teachers, teacher learning and school processes, and their own involvement in PLCs…

In this article, I examine the changing perception of craft activity since the Industrial Revolution and explore how the social values imposed on craft processes have impacted their effectiveness as tools for learning and self-transformation. Situated within a social constructivist framework, this article suggests that learning occurs as the…

This study utilized a survey research design to examine how school superintendents use concepts found in Professional Learning Communities (PLCs) with district leadership teams to improve professional capital in members of the leadership team. The research sought the correlation between the factors identified through factor analysis, as well as…

Post-pandemic exigencies such as isolation, technology fatigue, and financial pressures can be embraced as opportunities to return to, and strengthen, core values in honors involving student agency and community. This essay considers the pedagogical benefits of receding from technology in the classroom. Drawing on recent empirical research…

The aim of this study is to determine the effectiveness of the instruction process through the use of the PBFC model within the scope of the CN&C course. The evaluation of the PBFC process was made with the qualitative data obtained from the participants within the scope of CoI. Within the scope of cognitive presence, the participants firstly…

Global events have changed the fundamental way teachers teach and students learn in the 21st century. Teacher preparation programs have necessarily offered their programs through varied modalities. One specific framework for teaching in different modalities is the community of inquiry framework (CoI). In this study, we utilized CoI to study…

This article investigates the impact of educational contexts on automatic classification of online discussion messages according to cognitive presence, an essential construct of the community of inquiry model. In particular, the work reported in the article analyzed online discussion messages written in Brazilian Portuguese from two different…

In this action research study, we investigate the impact that social collaborative professional learning activities have on art educators' perceptions of required professional development on art assessment. The study was conducted in the context of a district-wide professional development program and evaluated through a performance-based…

School principals play a key role in the creation and nurture of school conditions conducive to Professional Learning Communities (PLCs). In China, whereas the term PLC itself is an imported concept and rarely used by school practitioners, the precept of PLCs, collaborative teacher learning activities, are firmly embedded in teachers' daily work.…

Faculty members often lack support structures in which they can support each other in crisis. The authors recently discovered that sharing ideas with a community of colleagues has made them more resilient. The Civility Community of Practice (CoP) at IUPUI transitioned to a weekly online teaching and support seminar in response to the university's…

This paper reports on a case study of a science, technology, engineering, and mathematics professional learning community (STEM PLC) that was set up to support a group of science teachers to teach STEM. Set in the context of an Islamic school in Southern Thailand, cultural sensitivity was invoked in forming the STEM PLC. The school offered a…

Years of research on teacher quality indicate that the quality and effectiveness of teachers have a significant influence on learner achievements. The quality of teachers and their teaching practice is widely debated where quality may depend on the teacher having acquired sound and relevant knowledge and skills to ensure effective teaching. The…

The swift transition to remote learning in response to the COVID-19 pandemic presented substantial challenges for both students and instructors in post-secondary natural sciences education. To examine teaching practices and student engagement during the emergency remote learning in the Spring 2020 semester, we surveyed 10 instructors and 261…