Teachers help shape the future of our world and impact school effectiveness and improvement. School effectiveness is most important because education is transformative and central to economic development and social change, called for in this year's AERA theme. Retaining talented teachers is pivotal to cultivating tomorrow's leaders and innovators.…

In this article I focus on an initiative to determine how a group of 7 purposefully recruited Grade 10 in-service life orientation teachers in the Dr Kenneth Kaunda district of the North West province conceptualise socio-environmental issues and aim to determine whether their teaching-learning practices are aligned with the expectations of the…

Purpose: This paper aims to draw on an in-depth qualitative case study of an undergraduate sustainability education course to show the extent of pedagogical reflection and teaching capability demonstrated in lived practice to support transformative, systemic and capability building learning processes, as advocated in the literature, for effective…

This mixed-methods study employed Hargreaves and Fullan's (Professional capital: transforming teaching in every school, Teachers College Press, New York, 2012) concept of professional capital to re-examine whether professional learning communities (PLCs) transformed instructional practices in contexts that endorse hierarchical cultures. PLCs that…

Coming from a Nordic environment, professionally working in teacher education, both authors engaged in developmental work and research in the Uluguru mountains in Tanzania. The research is carried out in a community-based organization for vulnerable youth, Mgeta Orphan Education Foundation (MOEF), which builds on principles of action learning and…

While progress to close racial achievement gaps has stagnated and income achievement gaps have grown, recent case studies enthusiastically describe "transformational" schools, which claim to establish conditions that enable students--primarily poor students of color--to achieve at levels far higher than their social background predicts.…

Positive turning points touch upon the essence of education. They epitomize its power and reflect its core agenda: maximizing human capital. Paradoxically, previous studies have not looked into this important phenomenon. The current exploratory study fills this lacuna by building on extensive empirical research of key educational experiences to…