This case study explores the professional identity of one reading specialist, Marsha, who struggled with testing pressures at her urban elementary school in the U.S. It offers an in-depth look at how Marsha's instructional decisions and practices in a pull-out reading program aimed at helping English Language Learners (ELL) shifted when she was…

The Finnish educational system and curricula lay emphasis on play, collaboration and equality. Modern educational practices allow the learning environment to be enlarged from indoor classrooms to outdoor playful learning environments (PLEs). PLEs have been constructed in schoolyards in Finland with the goal of increasing learning through play in…

The study reported in this article aimed at exploring what teachers know and do about fostering higher-order thinking skills in teaching science, and how they see themselves involved in achieving this end. Data were collected through semi-structured interviews with 11 teachers experienced in teaching high school physics, which is considered a…

This article addresses teachers' use of their professional time. With the support of substantive grounded theories from two separate studies--focusing on two "invisible" parts of teachers' work: recesses and off-the-clock work--we aim to conceptualize some patterns in contemporary work of teachers and discuss them in the light of…