Launched in 1995, the GoodWork Project is a long-term, multi-site effort to understand the nature of good work across the professional landscape and to promote its achievement by relevant groups of students and professionals. In this essay, the authors review the goals and methods of the initial research project and its most salient findings. They…

Changes in legislation and the policies of education (e.g., NCLB 2002, IDEA 2004), the potential benefits of response-to-intervention (RTI), and government funds to support early intervention have made RTI a prominent issue in current education. To prepare teachers for implementing RTI, there are several government-sponsored online professional…

Although the interactive whiteboard (IWB) is becoming increasingly prevalent in classrooms throughout the more efficient parts of the world and research has shown how this tool can increase the effectiveness of teaching and even transform pedagogy (Kennewell & Beauchamp, 2007), research literature overviews (Higgins, Beauchamp, & Miller,…

Virtual communities of practice (VCoP) have been advocated for some time as a promising means of taking professional development to teachers in widely distributed locations. However, geography, and indeed education literature as a whole, contains very few examples where this has been achieved. This paper reports on two VCoP professional…

This paper describes efforts to increase the prevalence, rigor and relevance of Project Based Learning in US schools and internationally. Under a grant from the Fund for the Improvement of Post Secondary Education (FIPSE), US Department of Education, the Buck Institute for Education and partners are offering: 1) an online staff development…

The development and validation of professional development resource materials for teachers by the National Council on Measurement in Education and associated professional groups is described. The developed module contains a context-orienting vignette, instruction, practice exercises, hands-on experiences, small group topics, and homework problems.…

In order to attract trade and industrial teachers and to help them perform successfully in the classroom, states across the nation must make teaching an attractive choice for skilled professionals and offer them adequate and accessible training in order to smooth the transition from industry to education. The New Teacher Institute (NTI) is a…

Discussions and accompanying exercises are provided in this two-part learning module designed to help instructors cope with the loss of traditional classroom power and control that may result from the implementation of individualized, self-paced instruction. Part I discusses the key concepts to be learned in the module: Maslow's theory of…