This practical resource offers a variety of facilitation moves and choices that one should consider when leading a virtual learning community. Do you facilitate a virtual learning community? Would you like to learn strategies and moves that ensure your participants have a valuable and meaningful experience? Protocols have been used in education…

Purpose: The paper discusses the use of co-design for staff professional learning within higher education. It suggests that three distinct approaches to professional learning can be characterised as help-yourself platforms/services, drive-by workshops and co-design workshops. It makes pragmatic suggestions for where co-design might be used and…

Professional learning communities (PLCs) have become the gold standard of teachers' professional learning. However, their success is far from guaranteed. Little is known regarding the processes that groups of learners undergo to become fully-fledged PLCs. This study followed a teachers' PLC over three years. It shows how the facilitator learned to…

A community of practice (CoP) is a vehicle for bringing in participants who share a common interest to learn from and grow with each other. In order to have a transformative learning experience, the CoP needs to be facilitated by a humble, credible facilitator. This article examines the role and benefits of a humble, credible facilitator and how…

The purpose of this case study was to explore the process of providing wraparound services and the community that supports facilitators working with students in a school setting in a southwestern state. Communities of practice (CoP) provided the theoretical framework for this study's design and analysis. The central research question for this…

Teacher professional learning communities (PLCs) have the potential to result in teacher professional development, provided that effective communication takes place during PLC meetings. Building on the perspective of collaborative knowledge building, this study examined teachers' interaction patterns during these meetings. Connections were…

Since facilitators are considered to be crucial actors in teacher teams, the aim of this study is therefore to explore, observe and characterise actions of facilitators by means of detailed video-observations of facilitators during teacher-team meetings. Results show that facilitators' actions vary from passive-absent and passive-waiting to…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to examine an essential component of enacting an improvement network: facilitation. In it, the author surfaces "synthesizing" as a core, power-laden facilitation practice that brought together network members from disparate institutions to converge on a shared network aim and theory of improvement.…

This study aims to identify the formulation differences of groups in two online activities in a university course with different strategies by using social network analysis. Specifically, the connections within the members and identification of brokers were analyzed. Whilst the group enhancing a "community of practice" in WeChat by…

Book groups are gatherings of readers who aspire to remain lifelong learners. Educators who read and enjoy quality fiction and non-fiction contribute with confidence to the rich, literate environment of classrooms. The National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) expresses, through rich policy statements and other published works, the vital…

Despite the complexity of facilitating professional development (PD) and growing attention to supporting facilitators, few tools exist for facilitators to engage in ongoing inquiry into their practice. In this article, we offer a practical measure, the Collaborative Professional Development Survey (CPDS), designed to provide facilitators with…

The research-to-practice gap describes the well-documented phenomena of researchers and practitioners working in silos, embedded in vastly different contexts. This "cultural divide" has several causes, including ineffective collaboration, inadequate understanding of context, and insufficient dissemination and translation of research.…

Midcareer teachers want something new from professional learning. Nearly all of the midcareer teachers the author interviewed described a need for content that is fresh or invites a meaningful extension of their existing skills and understandings. Midcareer teachers have different professional learning needs than novice teachers. To serve their…

Background: Faculty Learning Communities (FLCs) and Faculty Online Learning Communities (FOLCs) are ways to support STEM faculty implementing research-based curricula. In these communities, faculty facilitators take on the role of sharing expertise and promoting discussion. However, as members gain more experience, their needs change from…

Background: Physical Education (PE) teachers around the world often struggle with different experiences of precarity such as job insecurity, high workloads, lack of infrastructure in schools, and others. Communities of practice (CoP) are recognised as an important democratic strategy for teachers' continuing professional development (CPD). A…