Professional development for the further education sector (FE) in England, whether commissioned by the Education and Training Foundation (ETF), or the Department for Education (DfE), is typically formal learning. There are usually measurable outcomes, and practitioners are asked to identify changes to their practice. The focus on outcomes means…

Social and emotional learning (SEL) has been increasingly emphasized in educational research and practice for promoting children's wellbeing. Perhaps the most well-known SEL framework is the model provided by the Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning (CASEL). This framework has become the dominant framework informing state SEL…

Community-campus engagement (CCE) offers transformative opportunities for collaborative knowledge creation. Over the last few decades, thoughtful energy has gone into identifying the parts of a CCE and then developing tools to study these parts, with discrete focus on community groups, students, and faculty. Bringing a complexity science approach…

The purpose of this study is to explore the nature of complex adaptive systems (CAS) and network dynamics in international education (IE) programs in a U.S. higher education institution. I analyze the IE programs through a lens of complexity and network theories and ask how measures of engagement in complex networks affect performance in the IE…

In 2013, The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation awarded a group of seven librarians from the Research Library Leadership Fellows program of the Association of Research Libraries (ARL) a planning grant to examine the center of excellence (CoE) model for information services. Used in a variety of industries, CoEs are designed to attract the most talented…

Educational partnerships with area-based approaches comprise an increasingly well-grounded and internationally extended strategy for equitable improvement. However, literature shows a lack of focused inquiry on the assessment of these educational collaborative programmes. This article aims to develop and validate an instrument to assess these…

On September 22, 2012, NSF announced its decision to fund a three-year project, "Models for Information Assurance Education and Outreach" (MIAEO). In the first year of grant operation, MIAEO has invited 18 high school students, two K-12 teachers, and two CSUB student assistants to conduct research explorations in the fields of…

"Models for Information Assurance Education and Outreach" (MIAEO) is an NSF-funded, three-year project to support hands-on explorations in "network security" and "cryptography" through Research Experience Vitalizing Science-University Program (REVS-UP) at California State University, Bakersfield. In addition, the…

Although considerable evidence confirms that a director with good leadership and administrative skills is vital for developing and sustaining a high quality child care program, many directors assume the role with little management experience or training. This paper reports on a training program in Canada that combined a formal curriculum to…

Drawing upon a project on British transnational education (TNE) programmes offered in Hong Kong, this paper interrogates the capacity development impact of TNE on the students, the Hong Kong Government and the programme providers. It addresses the questions: "What capacity is being developed in TNE operations?" and "For whom?"…

As Americans shift their work and leisure activities online, Extension seeks to remain viable by delivering programs through a website known as eXtension. eXtension is predicated on the voluntary labor of Extension specialists and educators who form Communities of Practice to create and deliver content through the website. Evaluation of eXtension…

The chapters in this volume set a rich context for understanding the challenges that environmental evaluators face in their everyday work. In particular, the authors highlight the need for responsive, contextual, flexible, adaptive, multidisciplinary, and mixed-methods evaluation approaches. In this chapter, I reinforce their call and further…

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,…

A national provider of afterschool and summer programming plans to expand quickly into new regions, bringing its successful model of out-of-school learning to more children in disadvantaged schools and neighborhoods. A large number of staff members must be trained in the provider's program model in a short window of time. The organization needs to…

In a digital era in which technology plays a role in most aspects of a child's life, having the competence and confidence to use computers might be a necessary step, but not a goal in itself. Developing character traits that will serve children to use technology in a safe way to communicate and connect with others, and providing opportunities for…