In these times of legislative mandates for accountability and high-stakes testing, meeting the needs of diverse learners has never been more urgent. If change is to occur in classrooms across the United States, the change forces will be the administrators and teachers in each school. Educators must now choose a plan of action to address student…

This qualitative study explores how college faculty and students make sense of the Capstone process by examining their perspectives of this culminating performance assessment used in a graduate-level secondary education program. Students and faculty articulated positive benefits about the Capstone process including the benefit of opportunities for…

Recently, there has been a rapid proliferation of lesson study groups in the United States. Since deep knowledge about lesson study is rare in the U.S., it is likely that some of these groups have an incomplete understanding of this Japanese practice. Some may focus on structural aspects of the process of lesson study or may mimic its superficial…

As academic interest grows around participatory action research there is a need to reflect on the ways in which universities are adapting to the presence of alternative research methodologies. This article examines the rapidly expanding field of participatory action research (PAR) as it relates to academic involvement in community research and…

Previous research has shown that university students, when asked to rank different methods of learning and assessment tend to rate student presentations unfavorably. There are though, sound reasons for constructing learning situations around student presentations, resulting in presentations being an integral part of our psychology degree over the…

Teachers working in early care and education programs are engaging in professional development activities, many times without a foundation in child development or early childhood education. It is difficult for teachers to apply what is presented in professional development experiences to their classroom. The use of children's projects, the topic…

At present, numbers of students from diverse cultural and linguistic backgrounds in U. S. schools continue to increase exponentially. While the numbers of students from diverse backgrounds are increasing, the U.S. teaching force consists primarily of monolingual middle- to lower-middle class European American women who may lack the requisite…

The growth in the field of self-study of teacher education practices has largely been based on teacher educators' desire to better understand teaching and learning about teaching. This paper reviews research over the last decade that has been important in shaping understandings of self-study and the issues, concerns and agendas that are emerging…

The notion of critical friendship is central to self-study. A critical friend acts as a sounding board, asks challenging questions, supports reframing of events, and joins in the professional learning experience. In this paper, we share our experiences of acting as critical friends for each other in two separate self-studies of practice. We…

The question what contribution action research can make to the professional development of teachers is not easy to answer. It depends firstly on the context in which action research takes shape and secondly on the conceptual principles on which educators and teachers base their view of what good action research is. In order to be able to use…

A dominant theme arising out of a research project concerned with elucidating theory-practice relations in prospective and practicing teachers is the role and place of fear in what it means to teach and to learn. The text for this paper grew out of extended conversations the researcher had with 12 of these participants forming a self-study…

The purpose of this paper is two fold: first, to tease out the meaning inherent in the correlativity of the question and answer process and second, to suggest a philosophical answer to the question "What does it mean to question?" in the context of teacher education. To that end, we want to claim that R.G. Collingwood's "Logic of Question and…

In this brief article, the author advises teachers to not only exhibit self-discipline and motivation, but also to develop the courage to embark on a personal journey. He asserts that in order to grow professionally, it is necessary to become a reflective practitioner as well as an active teacher.

Monitoring the learning process in computer supported collaborative learning (CSCL) environments is a key element for supporting the efficacy of tutor actions. This article proposes an approach for analysing learning processes in a CSCL environment to support tutors in their monitoring tasks. The approach entails tracking the interactions within…

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…