This conceptual article presents a challenge to the dominant view and practice of teacher professional learning and its focus on preparing "experts in teaching" and proposes instead an emphasis on preparing "experts in learning." Drawing on contemporary knowledge on the nature of human learning and development, and in…

Teachers who work in school-age educare (SAEC) in Sweden possess a variety of educational qualifications. They hold a dual role working as teachers both within the compulsory program and school-age educare. This dual competence requirement means that their professional needs are unique and often different from that of their colleagues who only…

The implementation of large-scale intervention and development projects is often problematic, and the impacts of such projects usually fall somewhat short of what was expected. Additionally, the rationalities of intervention projects are not carried over into classroom teaching as directly as expected. This problem is generally known, but…

Physical education teacher communities have been studied and implemented as a successful approach to teacher professional development. Despite a wealth of literature, less is known about three aspects: sustained nature of a community over time, power relations among community members, and a comprehensive case study. This study aimed to address…

In England, there has been a teacher recruitment and retention crisis for many years. In such a crisis, it is important that initial teacher education (ITE) providers are able to identify, recruit and educate 'high quality' applicants to join the teaching profession. In this study, we focused on two case studies of beginning teachers who were…

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…

Purpose: This article aims to present a unique dimension to mentor studies in that unlike most research that focuses on the novice-teachers-mentee, this study explores the influence of mentoring on the mentors themselves. Two main questions were examined: "Which components of mentoring influence the mentors' professional development?"…

This study aims to increase understanding of the values and outcomes of teacher action research in conservatoire education. Teacher action research has been found to stimulate both professional development and improvement of teaching practice. A multiple-case study design was employed to examine teachers' activities and their perceptions of the…

This study outlines an approach that captures the messy landscape of the learning opportunities on which teaching focused academics draw. The Activity Centred Analysis and Design framework was employed to analyse data from a focused ethnographic study of seven TFAs in a research-intensive university. The Activity Centred Analysis and Design…

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…

This research investigated the role of continuing professional development (CPD) in further education (FE) through a small-scale study involving two general FE colleges and two independent training providers (ITP) in England. Teachers' experiences of their continuing development were collected through focus groups. These encouraged the teachers to…

This article is written in response to listening to teachers query the place of fun in learning. Students often express that learning should be fun but teachers are often unsure what they mean by this and whether fun is actually important to learning. We have drawn some relevant understandings and views together to promote further conversation and…

This article examines the characteristics, implementation and contribution of narrative pedagogy to the professional development of novice teachers through the example of two case studies. A holistic analysis of each case reflects a narrative pedagogy model, which includes four stages of the teaching-learning process: telling a personal life…

To better align teacher learning with teachers' learning needs, teachers' sense-making of an innovation during which teachers experimented with differentiated instruction was studied during two school years. Using answers to a questionnaire, 15 teachers' sense-making processes were characterised by three types of search for meaning: assimilation,…

This paper describes and analyses teacher professional development actions and learning within the context of Higher Education in a Spanish public university. Seven teachers from different areas of knowledge and with different levels of teaching experience in the university participated in the study. Individual class journals were interpreted…