This article describes an analytic approach for situating teachers' instructional practices within the institutional settings of the schools and school districts in which they work. The approach treats instructional leadership and teaching as distributed activities and involves first delineating the communities of practice within a school or…

Facilitating schools to develop more collaborative cultures is seen as one of the major challenges in promoting teachers' continuing professional development. This article recounts how a fifteen-month project designed to promote greater collegial learning and professional development emerged and developed within one school. Evidence suggests that…

This paper examines the pedagogic learning of a group of new lecturers at an international research intensive university who were participants on a formal teaching development programme. The lens of situated learning theory is utilised to gain new insights into the learning arising from the development programme but also to reveal certain…

Graduate teaching assistants (GTAs) are responsible for instructing approximately 25% of introductory statistics courses in the United States (Blair, Kirkman, & Maxwell, 2013). Most research on GTA professional development focuses on structured activities (e.g., courses, workshops) that have been developed to improve GTAs' pedagogy and content…

The purpose of this study was to examine how leaders foster school renewal by facilitating and participating in the types of teacher professional learning and development that improve student academic and non-academic outcomes. The methodology involved a backward mapping strategy that takes as its starting point, not theories of leadership, but…

One Master's Program, Initiatives in Educational Transformation, has integrated a computer management system (WebCT) into a learner-centered (Weimer, 2002) community of K-12 practicing teachers. Online discussions were an extension of instructional practices that supported dialogue, reflection, and self-assessment for the purpose of continuous…

In an article in this issue of "Innovate", Jim Gee asks the question "What would a state of the art instructional video game look like?" Based on the game "Full Spectrum Warrior", he concludes that one model is "to pick [a] domain of authentic professionalism well, intelligently select the skills and knowledge to…

For over 100 years, community colleges have been rightly seen as institutions designed to have an intimate relation to the community they serve. In order to know about the educational needs of the local communities, they were mandated to conduct frequent surveys and subsequently adapt the programs of study. Since its founding in 1959,…

Faculty development has been identified as a means of enhancing the ability of faculty members at higher education institutions to conduct scholarly engagement with community partners. The University of New Hampshire developed a semester-long Outreach Scholars Academy to help faculty partner with key external stakeholders in conducting research…

The study that we report in this paper, named as learning study, is a hybrid between a design experiment as characterized by Brown and Collins, and a Japanese lesson study as characterized by Yoshida, and Stigler and Hiebert. This paper aims at tracing the development of the learning study and examining its impact on teacher professional learning,…

The overall aim of this paper is to give an account of action learning in practice. It demonstrates the potential strengths and weaknesses of action learning. The information given is derived from five years in an action learning set. Significant events from within and without the action learning set will be explored using the themes clarifying;…

For the thirty-fifth year, the Research and Theory Division of the Association for Educational Communications and Technology (AECT) is sponsoring the publication of these Proceedings. Papers published in this volume were presented at the national AECT Convention in Louisville, Kentucky. The Proceedings of AECT's Convention are published in two…

This paper explores two different ways of understanding communities of practice in relation to workplace learning. This is based upon a case study of secondary school teachers working and learning in four subject departments in two English schools. In spite of institutional similarities, the cultures and working practices of the departments were…

The article argues that collective learning plays an important role in the practice of teacher research, which has not yet been adequately dealt with in its theory. Lave & Wenger's (1991) theory of "Situated Learning" is examined as an example for a conceptualisation of collective learning. In the concluding section, some provisions for "learning…

The evaluation of virtual learning environments (VLEs) and similar applications has, to date, largely consisted of checklists of system features, phenomenological studies or measures of specific forms of educational efficacy. Although these approaches offer some value, they are unable to capture the complex and holistic nature of a group of…