School counselors are vital to school reform and improvement efforts, as such, school districts are always searching for ways to actively involve school counselors in their own professional development. Due to the increased mental health and behavioral needs of students, there is an increased demand for more intentional and appropriate…

Building upon the work of social constructivists Vygotsky (1978) and Bakhtin (1981) and their work in dialogic instruction, as well as the self-efficacy theory put forth by Bandura (1977), this study sought to answer these questions: How does teacher participation in a book club impact teacher disposition to dialogic practices in the classroom?…

This article highlights how youth researchers representing two non-profit organizations, ByKids4Kids, and En Nuestra Lengua, share the results of a Youth Participatory Action Research study. In this project, youth draw upon triangulated data to examine community engagement in underrepresented US Latino/a students (ages 13-17) who served as…

Literature has extensively documented traditional conceptions of sustainable teacher professional development (PD). Recently, PD has promoted self-directed and small group opportunities that provide teachers with interactive and discussion-based social learning. For this reason, this research explores the effect of book clubs as a form of PD for…

The purpose of this mixed methods study was to implement and evaluate the impact of a virtual reality book club on the social presence of students. This research examined participants using virtual reality headsets to study the works of William Shakespeare. This study examined two research questions: (1) How does the implementation of a virtual…

There is currently an epidemic of high school readers who struggle; many are considered below-level readers, according to standardized tests, and they are not choosing to read for pleasure. The purpose of this case study was to evaluate whether a pedagogical framework called CRISP (choice, relevance, interest, success, and peer interactions) would…

Starting in fall of 2020, two faculty created and facilitated a book study with teacher candidates the semester before they entered student teaching. They read "This Book is Anti-Racist" by Tiffany Jewell and viewed the content through their own personal journey lenses and also applied the ideas to how they hope to bring anti-racism and…

Decades of research indicate teacher dissatisfaction with traditional professional development (PD), while a growing body of research literature indicates the value of heutagogical and andragogical learning in PD. This case study examines the experiences of 43 preservice teachers as they took part in professional development book clubs as part of…

We examined undergraduate students' perceptions of peers with intellectual and developmental disabilities (I/DD) before and after participating in an inclusive book club on the college campus. Over a six-week period, undergraduate students and students with I/DD enrolled in the post-secondary education program at the university engaged in an…

In recent decades much attention has been given to the optimization of professional development to support education reform; especially as it relates to science, engineering, technology and mathematics (STEM) fields. Many studies have shown that the most effective STEM professional development programs include active inquiry opportunities that…

In this article, the author talks about establishing a book club comprising international students and scholars and other members of the community interested in improving their English language skills. This book club, free to participants (although sponsored by the English Language Institute of the author's university), ran for ten weeks each over…

Globally, there is great interest in enhancing young children's literacy development as a route to improving worldwide literacy. To contribute to this area of interest, this paper reports findings from a multi-pronged early-literacy program designed to improve the print-knowledge of young children in Yucatec Mayan villages. The school-based…

The purpose of this study was to determine if reading achievement of students from high-poverty US schools differs as a function of participation in summer tutoring versus access to books. Data from 100 at-risk youth who participated in tutoring (n = 45) or received self-selected books (n = 55) indicated significant gains for students in both…

This cluster randomized controlled trial tested the impact of school-only and lifewide-learning (LWL) approaches to supporting early-grade learning over 2 years in rural Rwanda. We compare school-only and LWL treatments with a business-as-usual control condition and with each other. Schools in both treatment groups received reading materials and…

For a majority of teachers, traditional professional development workshops lack relevancy and leave teachers on their own to implement what was learned. Workshops are frequently structured in ways in which teachers are seen simply as recipients of information handed down by trainers (a more passive role) versus those who reflect on and construct…