When the staff at Northern Kentucky Cooperative for Educational Services (NKCES) discovered a new road to higher quality professional learning and better outcomes for students, they jumped on it and quickly decided they weren't going back. Three years ago Chief Academic Officer Melody Stacy and her colleagues learned about the Standards for…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper was to determine what experienced school leaders learned through participating in a three-year leadership initiative, called the Leadership Learning Community (LLC), that helped them coach less experienced leaders to lead school improvement efforts. Design/methodology/approach: Data were collected and analyzed…

This edited book offers diverse perspectives on the professional development of faculty, primarily at K-12 international schools. Contributions consider the many and complex facets of professional development -- from administrative factors, assessment and accreditation issues to student needs through a diversity, equity and inclusion lens which…

Purpose: The purpose of this article is to examine how the leadership coaching capacities of experienced school leaders can be developed to support less-experienced school leaders to lead continuous improvement efforts. In this article, we report the findings of a 2-year study of experienced school leaders who developed their leadership coaching…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to examine the impact of a leadership development initiative on the school leaders and leadership coaches who participated in it. The initiative, called the Leadership Learning Community (LLC), was created in a research-practice partnership between a consortium of 12 predominantly rural, high-poverty school…

Many reports on rural education give little attention to digital learning. At most, they tend to note either infrastructure needs or the potential of remote course access, with little focus on instruction, outcomes, or exemplars. This report intends to begin correcting that imbalance by connecting the dots between rural regions, rural education,…

The Texas Earth and Space Science (TXESS) Revolution was a 5-y teacher professional development project that aimed to increase teachers' content knowledge in Earth science and preparing them to teach a 12th-grade capstone Earth and Space Science course, which is new to the Texas curriculum. The National Science Foundation-supported project was…

In the knowledge economy, the journey of education to develop a flexible, knowledgeable, and skilled workforce should begin in pre-school and continue until at least an associate degree--the equivalent of a high school diploma a generation ago--is achieved. A high school diploma is not sufficient to compete in a global economy. The number of…

That individual schools and districts often simultaneously engage in multiple professional development projects in a "one-size-fits-all" model poses several quandaries. One quandary is attempting to foster a particular teacher behavior or disposition with little follow-up. A second is implementing a school-wide (or district-wide) program…

This article presents empirical evidence from a follow-up study of schools which had been members of a school-based research consortium. It offers insight into the work of professional learning communities at the level of practice and so contributes to the growing research interest in probing their development. It investigates the extent to which…

The articles describes the efforts of seven rural systems in northeast Alabama to respond in a cooperative manner to new initiatives from the State Department of Education to improve their inservice/staff development programs. The University of Alabama, primarily through its Gadsden Center, provided professional support and coordinating…

Discussion of the instructional applications of computing focuses on integrating computers into the higher education curriculum. Topics discussed include the history of computers in education; computer literacy; and ways to improve instructional uses of computers, including appropriate recognition for faculty involvement and improving access,…

This handbook reports on the use of consortia-appointed curriculum directors for meeting small, rural school districts' curriculum renewal needs. It is based on interviews with individuals involved with consortia in five Western U.S. case-study sites. Limited resources in rural schools often hinder curriculum-renewal efforts. If several districts…

Alternative models of rural school improvement consortia were identified through a review of research literature in order to determine what existing models were applicable to rural school consortia in the northwest United States. Organization structure of rural school collaboratives and characteristics associated with successful functioning were…

The Oregon Consortium for Incremental Development of Exemplary Career Education Programs had three major thrusts: (1) plans were made to upgrade levels of career education (K-12) based on 14 specified assessment categories; (2) each of the five participating consortium districts focused its efforts on one specific program category (the program…