Online teacher professional development is a branch of online learning, which offers educators opportunities to refine their pedagogical skills and collaboratively construct knowledge within professional learning communities. During these interactions, teachers often engage in knowledge construction while exhibiting diverse role characteristics.…

The teaching of English for Special Purposes (ESP) has become the mainstream of English teaching in Chinese universities. This article, from a perspective of Educational Ecology, explored ESP lecturers' professional development in Chinese universities. Semi-structured interviews were conducted on 13 ESP lecturers who were in the interim of…

This study examined the relationships between school-level professional learning communities (PLCs) and individual teachers' self-efficacy and commitment based on questionnaire responses from 1,203 teachers from 39 primary schools in mainland China. Multilevel analysis indicated that reflective dialogue significantly predicted self-efficacy.…

Chinese kindergartens' over 110 years of adaptation of foreign models is a vivid example of how globalization comes into direct contact with Chinese culture and creates cultural hybridities. Learning Stories as a narrative assessment tool to children's development from New Zealand, has swept China with the endorsement from the professional…

Sociocultural perspectives of learning emphasise the role of social interaction and activity in the process of knowledge construction and foreground the social-cultural settings in which knowledge construction occurs. This paper examines how in-service language teachers co-construct technological pedagogical content knowledge (TPACK) in…

Public engagement is recognised as having an increasingly important role in the changing landscape of higher education in the United Kingdom (UK), and is promoted as a 'pathway to impact' by many higher education funding bodies. However, there is limited evidence to support the outreach and impact gained by higher education institutes that…

This study was designed to initiate the process of building professional development learning communities for pre-service math teachers through revealing those teachers' conceptions/beliefs of students' learning and their own learning in China. It examines Chinese pre-service math teachers' conceptions of student learning and their related…

This volume recognises how many researchers across the social sciences, and in comparative and international education in particular, see themselves as insiders or outsiders or, more pertinently, shifting combinations of both, in the research process. The book revisits and problematises these concepts in an era where the global mobility of…

For the forty-fourth time, the Association for Educational Communications and Technology (AECT) is sponsoring the publication of these Proceedings. Papers published in this volume were presented online and onsite during the annual AECT Convention. Volume 1 contains papers dealing primarily with research and development topics. Papers dealing with…

In this case study, an online community was designed at a secondary school in China for the teachers to prepare their lessons collectively, reflect on their teaching practices, collect comments from peers, and share resources. A survey was administered to the teachers to investigate their perceptions on the online community for their professional…

The concept of "professional learning community" (PLC) has been suggested as a tool to improve teachers' professional competency and students' learning outcomes since the mid-1990s. In such a community, teachers can share their individual practices with the aim of searching for "good practice" based on the outcome of collective…

The current round of basic education curriculum reform in China is considered by many to be the most radical and wide-reaching. However, very little is known about education reform at the school level. Here we document and discuss some of the challenges and opportunities that the reform programme is providing for teachers and schools. We describe…