Teaching standards are regularly described as a mechanism for improving the status of the teaching profession and as a means to develop high-quality teachers. Less attention has been paid to the difficulties of fostering professional learning when externally produced standards are imposed on teachers. This paper outlines how lesson study can…

Purpose: The first aim of this study is to explore to what extent communities of practice occur in the school workplace. The second aim is to explore the relation between communities of practice and diversity in composition of teacher teams. Design/methodology/approach: Quantitative as well as qualitative data were gathered from seven teacher…

To encourage greater adoption of a pedagogical innovation (service-learning), semester long faculty learning communities were established at eight institutions. These learning community experiences produced gains in participants' (N = 152) self-assessed expertise with service-learning, ability to collaborate with community partners, and…

Educational blogs are currently gaining in popularity in schools and higher education institutions, and they are widely promoted as collaborative tools supporting students' active learning. However, literature review on educational blogging revealed a lack of a complete and consistent framework for studying and assessing students' engagement and…

A professional learning community (PLC) facilitates collaborative learning among colleagues at all levels in their common working environment. PLCs are particularly useful in schools, with teachers and principals meeting regularly to solve problems relating to teaching and learning. Being a means of improving student achievement, PLCs have…

For a variety of reasons, professionals are taking greater control over their own professional development and demonstrating a commitment to lifelong learning. Online resources and social media outlets have provided new ways for professionals to connect and form learning communities to build core knowledge and set standards of practice. The…

Borrowing her title from Parker Palmer's "Courage to Teach", Kathy Egawa revisits her own professional learning journey and contrasts traditional, one-size-fits-all professional development with her own more meaningful learning from teaching. Her stories and research from the field focus on 1) learning from students, 2) learning among colleagues,…

For the forty-first time, the Association for Educational Communications and Technology (AECT) is sponsoring the publication of these Proceedings. Papers published in this volume were presented at the annual AECT Convention in Kansas City, Missouri. The Proceedings of AECT's Convention are published in two volumes. Volume 1 contains twenty-seven…

The integration of emerging technologies in higher education presents a new set of challenges and opportunities for educators. With a growing need for customized lesson plans in online education, educators are rethinking the design and development of their learning environments. "Utilizing Virtual and Personal Learning Environments for…

This article informs about a multidisciplinary learning community targeting first year students from diverse cultural backgrounds at an urban community college. The combination of English, art, and philosophy of art in a "Creativity Cluster" offers an excellent opportunity for great teaching and learning experiences. Yet, how can faculty…

Creativity, invention, and innovation are values championed as central pillars of engineering education. However, university environments that foster open-ended design-build projects are uncommon. Fabrication and prototyping spaces at universities are typically "machine shops" where students relinquish actual fabrication activities to…

This article examines peer-to-peer learning--in virtual schools--among the most vulnerable of students. As a description of a comprehensive case study focused on three different students with disabilities, their parents, their teachers, and their school administrators, this article examines the effects of three kinds of variables on the prevalence…

Schools are often encouraged to facilitate extra-curricular learning within their own premises. This study addresses the potential of social networking sites (SNS) for supporting such out-of-class study. Given concerns that learning on these sites may happen at a surface level, we adopted self-determination theory for designing a social networking…

Google Docs and EtherPad are Web 2.0 tools providing opportunity for multiple users to work online on the same document consecutively or simultaneously. Over the last few years a number of research papers on the use of these collaborative tools in a teaching and learning environment have been published. This work builds on that of Brodahl,…

Many school districts struggle to recruit sufficient high-quality principals for their schools. A variety of conditions contribute to this challenge, including the retirement of the baby boom cohort and diminishing interest in administrative careers due to the expanded responsibilities of school principals. In response, districts enact a range of…