Approximately 50% of teachers leave the profession within five years. A disproportionate number of those who leave are secondary mathematics teachers. Teacher retirements, policy changes, teacher turnover, and teacher requirements contribute to the mass departure from the teaching profession. This phenomenological qualitative study examined…

A Professional Development School (PDS) offers unique university-school relationships that can change the culture of learning and add value to students and the community. Initially created in the 1980s, the PDS movement is growing across the country and is now a respected teacher education model. In this book, Carole G. Basile has collected…

The purpose of this study was to examine reasons for teacher participation in online communities of K-12 teachers. The authors interviewed 23 teachers from three self-generated online communities and analyzed more than 2,000 postings in those communities. The findings indicated five reasons for participation: (a) sharing emotions, (b) utilizing…

Laboratory Earth, a series of three NASA-Sponsored, on-line graduate courses for K-8 teachers, was designed to meet a variety of learning styles and appeal to teachers' motivation to learn the content and improve their teaching. This is especially important to teachers as they seek to demonstrate "highly qualified" status to meet No…

Registered Nurses (RNs), when educated in an Associate Degree (AD) program, learn in a face-to-face environment. Today's preferred standard of education for RNs is to achieve a minimum of a Bachelor's degree. For convenience while they continue working, numerous AD-prepared nurses seek online education to complete their Bachelor of Science in…

No Child Left Behind (NCLB) legislation and public pressure to prepare students for the twenty-first century has put increasing demands on schools to improve student performance. This action research study examined the efforts of an elementary school principal and her third and fourth grade teachers to improve students' performance in math. The…

Interprofessionalism, an emerging model and philosophy of multi-disciplinary and multi-agency working, has in increasingly become an important means of cultivating joint endeavors across varied and diverse disciplinary and institutional settings. This book is therefore, an important source for understanding how interprofessionalism can be promoted…

Purpose: This paper aims to introduce an enterprise-wide Web 2.0 learning support platform--SNAP, developed at Victoria University in Melbourne, Australia. Design/methodology/approach: Pointing to the evolution of the social web, the paper discusses the potential for the development of e-learning platforms that employ constructivist, connectivist,…

The purpose of this study was to understand how teachers participate in and benefit from an online community of practice (NETwork) for learning to teach. Dependent-samples t-tests were employed to examine the significant differences of members' perceptions of their social experience, while content analysis was utilized to identify members'…

The answer to massification in higher education lies not in paper-behind-glass style e-learning. Such courses lack the necessary interaction to ensure success. There are perceived upper limits to where e-learning can be up scaled to accommodate large classes. The Community of Inquiry framework provides a convenient instrument to assess the quality…

The study discusses the professional identity and aspects of professional development of Clinical Faculty Teacher Educators (CFTEs) teaching methods courses in a College of Education during a time of change. The above aspects were revealed while analyzing data collected to evaluate an in-service professional development course for CFTEs. Data…

In this paper we examine aspects of the construction of authentic membership, competence, and sense of shared purpose within a professional community of educators accomplished by a class of pre-service teachers during a spontaneous electronic conversation. Implications for teacher education are considered.

Improving teacher quality in P-12 mathematics is a national need, and many universities and schools are working to address it. With the support of the National Science Foundation (NSF), twelve math and science institutes across the country are helping P-12 teachers strengthen their capacity to support students' learning. These NSF Institutes…

The Presenters' Collaborative Network (PCN) was started in 2002 to support the creation of a corps of teacher-consultants who would lead workshops for the Rhode Island Writing Project (RIWP) at local schools and conferences. The PCN is a group of teachers, past participants from summer institutes or year-round embedded programs in schools that…

This article describes the development, implementation, and evaluation of a year-long research learning community to assist doctoral students with developing confidence, knowledge, and skills necessary to become competent rehabilitation researchers. In the first section, we describe some of the challenges confronted by doctoral students as they…