An auxiliary and potentially powerful source of practitioners' knowledge, skills, and dispositions can come from participation in research-practice partnerships. Research-practice partnerships link researchers, usually faculty at institutions of higher education, with practitioners working in schools, district central offices, county offices, or…

This article describes the knowledge and skills that professional learning community members need to create a habit out of their desire. Habits serve educators as signposts of progress toward achieving their desires. They are interim indicators of a professional learning community's success. Ultimately, of course, professional learning communities…

This article describes an equity education program established in 2009 by Ontario's (Canada) Ministry of Education to improve outcomes for students at risk and create the conditions needed for student success. Beginning teachers were crucial partners and emerging leaders of equity education. Some of the equity concerns these teachers faced were…

Teachers in the Federal Way (Wash.) Public Schools had no shortage of student data. Standardized test scores, unit tests, and report card grades were as familiar to educators as reading, writing, and arithmetic. With the onset of statewide testing in the 1990s, data analysis was expanded to cover a multitude of state learning goals in grades 4, 7,…

New technologies can dramatically change the way people live and work. Jet engines transformed travel. Television revolutionized news and entertainment. Computers and the Internet have transformed just about everything else. And now small video cameras have the potential to transform professional learning. Recognizing the potential of this new…

Introducing new practices alone seldom results in new practices being incorporated into ongoing classroom practices. The Concerns-Based Adoption Model (CBAM) provides a way to transfer new practices into the classroom. This article presents the Implementation Bridge, a metaphor for moving from the earlier or less advanced stages to the later or…

An Illinois district brings a local university into the district to craft advanced learning embedded in the needs of specific schools. Community High School District 155 in Crystal Lake, Ill., and Northern Illinois University (NIU) College of Education engaged in a partnership that has provided significant benefits, posed limited challenges, and…

"This is the piece that's been missing." This reaction is common among educators engaged in AIW Iowa, an initiative that engages teachers and administrators in professional learning communities that are improving student achievement, increasing student engagement, and building a schoolwide professional culture focused on improving…

In the past decade, interest in the form of professional learning loosely described as coaching has exploded. This growing interest in coaching is likely fueled by educators' recognition that traditional one-shot approaches to professional development--where teachers hear about practices but do not receive follow-up support--are ineffective at…

Just when educators are learning more about what constitutes effective professional development, a collaborative team of education researchers and practitioners have developed, tested, and implemented a cost-effective method of measuring and reporting on the quality of teacher professional development. The teacher professional development analysis…

Individuals and organizations have an amazing capacity to maintain their current beliefs and practices in the face of massive, well-intentioned efforts to change them. There are two facts that cannot be ignored if teaching and learning are to be improved for the benefit of all students: First, the majority of teachers know more about effective…

Like most policies and practices in education, agendas for achieving social justice in classrooms are defined and pursued by adults. Missing are the perspectives of those most directly affected by what educators decide and do: students. Research tells educators how to support diverse students' learning and thus to foster more equal opportunities…

In the past, if a question is asked of a student, and that student needed a few minutes to think, that student's thinking would be interrupted by somebody else who'd be shouting out. Now, teachers at St. Johnsbury School in Vermont are really focusing on think time for students and really working with other students in the classroom to be…

This article describes how an effort to help two schools achieve high levels of teacher implementation of the Sheltered Instruction Observation Protocol (SIOP) resulted in a deeper understanding of the true learning value of a sustained and committed partnership among university faculty, district personnel, and school-based educators. The…

In her role with the School Administrators of Iowa leading Iowa's leadership grant from The Wallace Foundation, the author works with a coalition of individuals and groups striving to implement a cohesive leadership system for school leaders. Efforts to create a cohesive leadership system in Iowa for the past nine years have resulted in many…