The goal of the study was to examine the factors that drove early childhood teachers to accept a leadership role in professional learning communities (PLCs), their perceptions of the role's characteristics and the implications of taking on an additional role beyond the teaching of kindergarten-age children. This qualitative study included 30…

The article addresses the problem of providing in-service education within government-led reform initiatives yet enhancing professionalism in the Early Childhood Education and Care sector. The study was conducted during policy-mandated reform in Australia to investigate effective ways to support educational leaders in centres rated as not meeting…

According to Government guidance in the UK, improving attendance is everyone's business. This article sets out the work of one local authority to develop their own multi-agency approach to reduce rates of emotionally based school non-attendance. The Research and Development in Organisations model provided a structure for the action research…

This article is based on the author's autoethnographical research on leading practices of Steiner school principals over a period of major change and crisis in a Steiner school's life. This research included the use of the theory of practice architectures to uncover unsustainable contradictions in Steiner schools which constrain the full promise…

Despite over two decades of research, initial teacher education (ITE) partnerships remain problematic. Our study explores the development of a mandated ITE university-school partnership in Wales amidst significant educational reform. Through qualitative research, involving focus groups with 47 teacher educators from a university and 15 schools, we…

In times of crises, educational developers (EDs) work to ameliorate the teaching- and learning-related impacts caused by campus-wide disruptions such as health-related emergencies, mass shootings, and environmental disasters. These incidents may impact the personal-psychological factors and processes of EDs that, in turn, influence their…

This book explores the reforms sweeping China's educational sector. Traditionally dominated by rote learning, China's educational system has increasingly been criticized by the rising middle class for failing to foster creativity, for arbitrary placement of students, and for fostering regional inequities. Reforms to make Chinese education…

Background: Artificial intelligence (AI) applications have been implemented across all levels of education, with the rapid developments of chatbots and AI language models, like ChatGPT, demonstrating the urgent need to conceptualize the key debates and their implications for a new era of learning and assessment. This adoption occurs in a context…

This qualitative study explores the impact of the emergency transition to remote education (ETRE) during the COVID-19 pandemic on instructors and students through the lens of self-determination theory (SDT). A modified thematic analysis of narratives from a cross-sectional survey revealed eight themes: Sense of loss/grief, Role conflict,…

This essay examines the role of educators in the tangled economic, social, environmental and technological crises of the present time. It argues that a central purpose of education in this period is to support students to imagine and make liveable futures on their own terms. To do this, the paper proposes that the colonizing, optimizing and…

COVID-19's unprecedented effects on the world emphasize the minimal exigent research on best practices of social work pedagogy during crises. The purpose of this paper is to inform this research and our understanding of social work education's shift at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. This study draws upon the narratives of four key…

This inquiry explores the dynamics of community college faculty experiencing a critical change event. The study is situated in faculty response to environmental paradigm shifts, evolving organizational mission contexts and changing roles and responsibilities that are a result of the transition of one traditional community college organizational…

Educators throughout the ages have offered metaphors and analogies for teaching and teachers. Prominent among them are: gardener, midwife, facilitator, guide, sacrament. Each of these metaphors shed light, from a different angle, on the act of teaching. This article proposes the metaphor of tragedy as a way of shedding new light, from a totally…

In 2013 the Iowa Teacher Leadership and Compensation planning grant (TLC) committed to providing 150 million dollars annually toward rewarding effective teachers with leadership opportunities and higher pay, attracting promising new teachers with competitive starting salaries, and fostering greater collaboration for all teachers to learn from one…

Chinese education is controversial: it is not only lauded for Chinese students' high test achievements but also criticized for curbing students' deep learning and development into well-rounded individuals. In the current paper, we propose that self-determination theory (SDT) serves as a useful framework for anatomizing Chinese educational ecology,…