The need to improve math instruction in the United States has led to a variety of reactionary reform efforts. Often, these reforms require teachers to step away from deeply embedded instructional practices, which are difficult to change. Professional learning communities (PLC) are a common form of professional development in education that have…

In June 2020, the world witnessed an upsurge in Black Lives Matter (BLM) demonstrations following the murder of George Floyd, an African American, by a White American police officer. The international response called for the global community to reassess the value of black lives blighted by racist social systems. The mass sentiment acted as a…

Purpose: This paper is a thinking piece that examines, from the viewpoint of a Canadian pracademic, working through two definitions of pracademic, a collaborative relationship between academics and practitioners and a person engaged as a practitioner and researcher. Two aspects of a pracademics scholarship is discussed, wide awakeness and praxis.…

After outlining the central role of leadership for individual and interorganisational learning in sustainable Professional Learning Networks (PLN), this article describes Austria's professional learning environment and professional learning (PL) within this changing field. In order to meet urgent institutional requests for sustainable PL, new…

Background: The question of how best to enable sustainable professional development remains a challenging one. The research reported here is situated within a professional learning communities (PLCs) approach as a long-term goal for continuing professional development (CPD) with action research (AR) principles as a means of organisation. Purpose:…

School leadership is a critical factor in school improvement. The Delaware Department of Education (DDOE) and Region 4 Comprehensive Center (R4CC) have strengthened school leadership through implementation of the Delaware Leadership Network and the Delaware Principal Supervisor Leadership Program. These two major efforts, collaboratively designed…

In the modern educational era, there is an increasing focus on Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (STEM) education. Innovation and workforce preparation play a large role in the push to increase scientific literacy, thinking skills and high-skilled personnel. However, there are ongoing issues with reforming education to meet these goals as…

This paper explores one implementation of an extended, structured, collaborative professional experience program. Its context is a new partnership between a university and a professional experience school. The program draws on elements of Instructional Rounds and Lesson Study, framed around a learning community model of professional experience for…

This article explicates the structure, content, and pedagogy of an urban district's professional development for literacy coaches. To analyze qualitative data on a district's yearlong coach professional development, I utilize situated cognition theory. Observation and interview data reveal that the coach community of practice (CCOP) was a venue in…

Ongoing educational reforms and the accountability movement in public education can pose significant challenges for teachers as they strive to meet a critical, social-justice vision for the social studies. Teachers' continued professional growth and learning are viewed as the main factors towards achieving this goal; however, quite often the…

Systems, structures, and practices perpetuate disparities because they reinforce barriers that sort and separate students based on assumed success or failure. When students are disadvantaged in this way, the implicit message is that their learning doesn't matter. The counterpoint to these discriminatory systems is an asset-based approach, which is…

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…

This is an historical and comparative paper that examines the importance of women's educational organizations across time and space and the deliberative attempts of individual members to advocate for the expansion of their professional knowledge, expertise and reach. Specifically, the historical spotlight is turned on the International Federation…

Successful schools have a clearly defined vision for student success, usually measured by college and career readiness standards. They are able to articulate success indicators for student performance as well as success indicators for the staff performance needed to meet those student indicators. Successful schools are able to describe a theory of…

School-university partnerships not only take time and care to establish and develop but also need sensitivity and acknowledgement of work accomplished if the partnership disbands. What are the repercussions of ending the partnership abruptly with little advance notice? This article examines this question by looking at the school participants'…