This report provides a project snapshot of the Study of Coaching Practices in Early Care and Education Settings (SCOPE) from 2016-2021. The primary goal in the SCOPE project was to learn more about the ways coaching is implemented to improve instructional practice in early care and education (ECE). SCOPE focused on coaching in center-based…

Coaching is a common approach to professional development and support for quality in early care and education (ECE) settings, and is an especially important part of professional development because it can be tailored to meet teachers' and family child care (FCC) providers' needs and can positively affect instructional practices, the quality of the…

In teacher education, a collection of research has established the importance of reflection in professional development. Lesson study, a popular professional development in Japan, incorporates reflection in one of its stages to enhance teachers' capacity to look into their enacted practices to improve their research lessons. However, there appear…

Relevance: The relevance of the problem under investigation is caused by the fact that the problem of the formation of the professional and didactic culture of future teachers has not been sufficiently elaborated. The purpose of the article: The article aims to the solution of the problem of improving the content of future teachers' training with…

Many school-improvement efforts include time for teacher collaboration, with the assumption that teachers' collective work supports instructional improvement. However, not all collaboration equally supports learning that would support improvement. As a part of a 5-year study in two urban school districts, we collected video records of more than…

This article reviews teacher professional development norms as they are shifting toward collaborative practice. It is posed that passive and individual practices are inadequate to prepare teachers to integrate the academic skills that learners need for both workforce and college readiness. Promising practices in professional development are…

Internationally, forms for teacher education (initial and continuing) are under the spotlight for change. This article briefly considers what is at issue and what opportunities might be available for moving towards "professionalisation" in the provision of outstanding teachers. In particular, it suggests how we should characterise the thinking…

Teaching is a complex activity that requires making ongoing multiple decisions and sporadic, responsive actions all while performing preplanned prescribed tasks. Evidence of certain aspects of teaching can be best assessed with a well-designed observation instrument. This instrument was designed to assess the enactment of the essential elements of…

Preparing school administrators to promote effective instruction of English language learners (ELLs) is an important dimension of today's educational leadership programs, requiring innovative program activities. This study explores school leadership candidates' use of an observation tool targeted to ELL instruction that incorporated guided video…

The cooperative development discourse framework (Edge, 2002) has traditionally been used to help individuals-who-teach explore and improve their teaching practice by speaking openly and nondefensively to one of their colleagues, who will refrain from judging and evaluating them. This article presents the rewards of establishing such a…

Instructional coaching is an innovative approach to professional development that, while challenging, has significant benefits for teachers and children. Using reflective practice strategies--including posing open-ended questions to teachers and videotaping classes--coaches help teachers analyze their teaching and its impact on children. Coaches…

Continuing professional development (CPD) for teachers must be situated within the context of the practice of teachers and be relevant to their teaching and learning needs. A CPD project was conducted in a Hong Kong kindergarten class. For five years prior to the CPD project, the class had used a mixed curriculum of project approach topics and…

Reflective practice means that teachers must subject their own teaching beliefs and practices to critical examination. One way of facilitating reflective practice in ESL teachers is to encourage them to engage in classroom observations as part of their professional development. This paper reports on a case study of a short series of classroom…

There has been a wealth of research examining learning environments as one of the variables that contributes to academic success for students studying science. A constructivist learning environment has been explored as one way to assist students in achieving greater success with science learning. There is a lack of research concerning how and if…

Standards can aid educators as they work to produce strong student writers who can create meaningful and skillfully crafted authentic pieces of writing. This once-a-month, yearlong professional development program, conducted during the school day, shifted a district's kindergarten writing program to a writing workshop model that enabled the…