Empathic design involves two social practices -- one is collaboration with users to elicit and make a meaning of user experiences, and another is intrateam collaboration to develop a mutually understood, agreed-upon interpretation of user experiences among team members. This study is focused on the latter phenomenon, conceptualizing this social…

A state organization of graduate faculty teaching in educational leadership preparation programs, the Michigan Association of Professors for Educational Leadership (MAPEL), serves as the focus for this case study designed to examine its efforts to reset, repurpose and reimagine its role. Using Bolman and Deal's (2107) observations of…

Background: Research groups are social locations where teaching and learning merge among students and a principal investigator (PI). When joining, some students are able to contribute to groundbreaking research that addresses complex problems, under the direction of their PI. However, there are accounts of students having a wide range of negative…

Research around learning community models often shows a structured and defined model to follow with the underlying assumption being if the steps are followed, the results will come. The model we offer in this paper is rather counter-cultural as it was not a specific process or practice we followed; rather, we found ourselves in a highly engaging,…

This study investigated the effects of professional learning communities (PLCs) on teacher commitment in China. A total of 1020 teachers in Shanghai participated in a survey. The results show the organisational characteristics of PLCs which comprise supportive leadership, organisational structure and cultural barriers, had significant and positive…

Communities of practice (CoPs) can provide opportunities for diverse and inclusive groups to convene, share, collaborate, and support others. Using a self-study research approach combined with a visual research method, this study explores both scholarly and practice-based insights to describe the anticipated attributes of a high functioning CoP…

In this paper we address the obfuscation surrounding the concept of learning communities by operationalizing "community" according to four characteristics that serve as boundaries for defining a community: access, relationships, vision, and function. Although these community boundaries sometimes overlap, they represent distinctive…