Teachers bring with them a variety of beliefs when they arrive at continual professional development (CPD) training courses focusing on the inquiry-based approach to science education. These beliefs influence the way they understand, accept and ultimately implement the content of the training. The purpose of the present study was to identify the…

Purpose: In times of reform and consequential changes, school superintendents act as mediators between government policies and those who implement them in the field. This article explores the perceptions of school superintendents in Israel concerning their professional development (PD) process, especially during the implementation of Israeli…

Whereas Professional Learning Communities (PLCs) are a frequently applied professional learning tool in education, their use is often limited to an application among (a) teachers and (b) within-schools. This article contributes to the nascent research evidence on PLC usage for principal professional learning. As outcomes align with PLCs' phased…

This paper outlines a case study of the reflections of two novice teaching English to speakers of other languages (TESOL) teachers in South Korea through the lens of a framework for reflecting on practice that included reflections on the teachers' philosophy, principles, theory, practice, and beyond practice. Overall, the results revealed that…

This study investigates the perceptions of teaching and learning of teachers from Saudi Arabia who participated in a 12-month professional development programme based in Australia. Considering the design of the programme and the vast differences between the education systems and cultures of the two countries, this study examines Saudi teachers'…

Public schools have been under great scrutiny. National and international tests have exposed deficiencies of students' knowledge prompting federal and state legislation to focus on improving schools' effectiveness. The pressure induced by recent legislation have school districts scrambling to increase student achievement. One area of reform…

Increasingly, new librarians graduate to face a world of changing technology and new ways of interacting with information. The anxiety of this shifting environment is compounded for tenure-track librarians who must also meet scholarship and instruction requirements that may be unfamiliar to them. One way that librarians can navigate the transition…

Mentoring student-teachers and novice teachers constitutes a critical factor in teacher-education programmes and yet, little emphasis has been placed on the mentors themselves, particularly in relation to their own professional development (PD) and the construction of their identities. Does it really matter? This study investigates two groups of…

Components of the professional role of the pharmacist were studied. Role components evaluated were people, status, and science. A questionnaire was administered to the student body of the School of Pharmacy, the University of Mississippi, for two consecutive academic years. The questionnaire is appended. (Author/MLW)

Two new scoring methods for the Nurses' Professional Orientation Scale (NPOS) were developed and tested to advance the assessment of professional socialization. These methods were based on: traditional versus nontraditional view of nursing (internal consistency of .81); and practicing nurses' view of nursing (internal consistency of .88). A total…

The applicability of a factor analytic approach to explore the nature of a complex job performance criterion for nursing practice and to determine the dimensions of this criterion was investigated. A national sample of 1,038 nurse educators from 85 randomly selected programs judged performance criteria contained in the Clinical Nursing Rating…

Four dimensions (work tempo, professional focus, career reward structure, and sense of personal power and efficacy) involved in public school-university collaboration are examined. The study had the objectives of using summated rating scales to measure shared perceptions and to describe work perceptions of professional educators. A questionnaire…