Despite the efforts of traditional and alternative teacher education programs (i.e. pre-service teacher education) in the United States, teachers frequently report feeling unprepared by the time they begin teaching full time in the classroom. Teachers with low levels of self-efficacy are correlated with lower job satisfaction, higher levels of…

The MyTeaching Partner-Secondary (MTP-S) coaching program for middle and high school teachers builds on research studies about effective coaching that have shown positive effects on teacher and student outcomes. For the past five years, Learning Forward has engaged in a project led by the American Institutes for Research (AIR) to better understand…

How can faculty development (FD) support responsive innovations? At one end of the spectrum are rich, time-intensive programs grounded in frameworks like the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, where instructors' innovations are part of larger projects in which they design and conduct comprehensive research studies in their courses. At the other…

The National Science Foundation's (NSF) Inclusion across the Nation of Communities of Learners of Underrepresented Discoverers in Engineering and Science (INCLUDES) program seeks to address challenges of broadening participation in STEM at scale. The NSF INCLUDES Aspire Alliance ("Aspire," or "the Alliance") aims to diversify…

There is limited robust evidence of the effectiveness of professional development (PD) on teacher retention. This study tested The Academy for Teachers' PD program, a content-focused intensive workshop with complementary events. This program is designed to impact teacher retention, support integration of material into the classroom and teacher…

The Critical Friends Group, a highly articulated model of professional learning, posits that, in order for teachers to learn together in ways that change their practice, the content and nature of their conversations must change (National School Reform Faculty, 2012). The content needs to change from externally driven agendas that address (in a…

Alternative instructional and curricular models are regarded as more comprehensive and suitable approaches to providing quality physical education (Kulinna 2008; Lund and Tannehill 2010; McKenzie and Kahan 2008; Metzler 2011; Quay and Peters 2008). The purpose of this study was to describe the impact of the Early Steps Physical Education…

Peer observation of teaching is an established developmental tool in face-to-face settings. While there have been studies into peer observation as applied to asynchronous online teaching, less is known about its application to teaching online using synchronous communication systems. We describe a small-scale study of an online peer observation…

Under neo-liberal policies in many countries, there has been an extensive trend of educational reform which intensifies competition. Such educational reform is underpinned by direct government control, seen in centre to periphery forms of policy administration and implementation with strong emphasis on managerialism and test-oriented…

Professional learning communities and teacher efficacy are at the core of many of the current educational reform models. The intention of this dissertation was to identify the correlation between professional learning communities and collective teacher efficacy for math data teams in the six Kaua'i Complex Area secondary schools, as measured by…

Although knowledge has been linked to productivity within and between organizations, little is known about how knowledge flows into schools and then diffuses from teacher to teacher within schools. Here, the authors hypothesize that the value of different sources of knowledge depends on a teacher's current level of implementation. The authors test…

Operational characteristics for successful mentoring programs of new university faculty include clarity of purpose of the program, methods for matching mentors and proteges, mentor training, mentor-protege relationship building, and program effectiveness assessment. Strengths of formal, informal, peer, group or consortia, intra-departmental,…

While there is a growing body of literature promoting a new paradigm of differentiated professional development in which teachers' voices shape learning opportunities, the reality is that much professional development continues in an outdated, top-down mode. Teacher input is rarely solicited to determine the perceptions of teachers regarding their…

Paralleling the accelerating pace of educational change in the last two decades has been the development of a professional learning community (PLC) in schools. Characterised by teacher collaboration and a spirit of enquiry, the PLC represents a response to change and an opportunity to benefit teachers, students and schools, using an approach most…

The new Queensland "Mathematics Years 1-10 Syllabus" differs from previous syllabuses in that it has an outcomes structure that describes how students think, reason, and work mathematically. The main challenge for secondary teachers implementing the new syllabus lies in taking a more investigative approach to "working…