In a successful middle school, school counselors support young adolescents' academic progress and personal wellbeing through a variety of methods. Classroom instruction, or classroom guidance, offers one method of providing such support and features the benefit of allowing middle grades school counselors to reach all students in their schools.…

We discuss an original study and two replications conducted over 18 years examining the impact of Teacher Study Group (TSG) in Vocabulary, a professional development (PD) approach for improving pedagogy and student learning. Study 1 focused on the design and development of the PD and included a small-scale randomized controlled trial to assess the…

The purpose of this study is to understand how and what leaders (a principal, district coach, regional coach, and district assistant superintendent) professionally noticed within a video club context as they watched mathematics lessons. Professional noticing refers to the extent to which leaders are able to move beyond forming general descriptions…

In the research reported in this paper, using a modified version of the interconnected model of teacher professional growth (IMTPG) proposed by Clarke and Hollingsworth (Teaching Teacher Educ 18:947-967, 2002), we aimed to understand the learning dynamics in a lesson study of a group of five teachers of grades 5-6, during their work around…

Purpose: This study aimed to explore teachers' learning processes through a hybrid cross-cultural lesson study (LS) because little is known about the learning process through this novel and promising LS approach. Design/methodology/approach: This cross-cultural LS lasted over six months focusing on developing a research lesson (RL) related to…

Science education is shifting from a vision of students memorizing facts towards engaging in figuring out the natural world as students build ideas from their own experiences and backgrounds. This shift is hard for teachers. One way to support teachers is curriculum-based professional development, which pairs high-quality instructional materials…

Exploring science teachers' classroom assessment behaviors is a way to understand the professional knowledge competencies underlying effective teaching practices. One of the most important components of in-class assessments is teacher questions. However, studies examining teacher questions that provide support to accurately determine student…

Promoting teachers to lead classroom discourse effectively is a relevant topic for teacher professional development worldwide. This study compares the impacts of two teacher professional development programmes that aim to support teachers in their classroom discourse practices. In one programme, an adaptive and practitioner-led approach was…

Tailoring workshop (TW), a school-based teacher training program, has been developed in China on the basis of the Teaching Research Groups (TRGs) to better focus on teacher's genuine needs, improve their problem-solving ability, and inter-subject collaboration. Literature on teacher workshops predominately roots in western settings whereas scant…

We employ Sfard's ("Thinking as communicating," 2008) "ritual towards exploration" idea to theorize the learning trajectory of two middle school teachers attending a professional development (PD) program designed around the "5 Practices for Orchestrating Productive Discussions" and Accountable Talk. Data included four…

The aim of this study was to investigate how principals (n = 4) and teachers (n = 20) from four lower-secondary schools perceived and evaluated sustainable professional development processes in their schools. To understand their experiences and perceptions, interviews and focus group conversations were conducted at the end of a one-year research…

Health is a resource for pupils' learning. Including health in the curriculum and teaching will enable pupils to understand the connection between health and learning. Action research has proved to be effective from a learning perspective. Our purpose was to explore whether, and how, using action-oriented research methods in a middle school-based…

Playground Physics is a supplemental middle school science program designed to support embodied learning by enabling students to connect physics concepts to their own playful activities. The purpose of this study was to examine a model for scaling up the Playground Physics program and to determine the program's impact on middle school students'…

We investigate teacher beliefs about discourses for equation solving and the challenges these beliefs might pose for the implementation of instructional practices that promote deductive reasoning in algebra. To uncover these beliefs, we recorded three video explanations of solutions to the same linear equation with distinct discursive…

Adaptive teaching on the micro-level of teacher-student interaction has often been investigated, but rarely with respect to students' content-specific learning pathways. In this paper, we present an analytic approach to disentangle the learning content into its components and to capture the content-specific adaptivity in teaching practices with…