The aim of this study was to investigate student teachers' agency in their identity negotiations as first-year students on a path towards becoming teachers. A narrative inquiry approach was employed in the analysis of the interviews conducted with 16 Finnish student teachers. One master narrative and two counter-narratives were identified in which…

In this interview study, the authors examined the process of coaching in the context of a year-long professional development initiative designed to support teachers' expertise in implementing culturally and linguistically responsive practices. Using transformative learning as a theoretical and analytical frame, they investigated 20 teachers'…

Teachers who participate in learning and teaching abroad enhance their intercultural competence, develop more globally informed and critical perspectives on education, and improve their foreign language and teaching skills. However, most of the research on teacher study abroad has been conducted with pre-service rather than in-service teachers. To…

This article is about personally driven professional development through the use of reflective self-study. The argument that teachers need to take responsibility for their own learning while also taking decisions on how and in what areas to develop is strongly made throughout the article. Data for this article were gathered over a 10-year period…

With performativity and evidence-based teaching, the development of action research (AR) by teachers brings tensions and challenges as teachers move outside their comfort zones and question their practice. This article draws on a small-scale research study developed with teachers. It was funded as part of a professional development initiative by a…

Although the importance of understanding the social and cultural processes mediating pre-service teachers' expansion of the power to act has been increasingly recognized lately, the way the concept of "agency" is portrayed in most of the studies focuses almost exclusively on the subject of activity and therefore, there is insufficient…

Teaching requires the navigation of an intricate terrain of complex and often overlapping issues, many of which extend beyond the classroom setting. Teachers are uniquely placed to influence large numbers of learners beyond the delivery of prescribed curriculum, and therefore need to be particularly careful and aware of their professional ways of…

Teacher professional learning is widely accepted as a mediating factor for enhancing student outcomes. While many teachers across the world engage in professional development (PD) to enhance their professional learning, what is less evident is how to support that learning to result in change following teacher PD. Acknowledging that not all teacher…

As governments the world over continue to advocate the importance of teacher professional learning, researchers and practitioners continue to explore ways to enact that learning in meaningful ways. The value of narrative for teacher education has been widely discussed and several studies show that learning is significant when teacher-writers…

This study focuses on exploring teacher learning in terms of teachers' professional agency embedded in the classroom. Teachers' sense of professional agency is related to perceiving instruction as a bidirectional process, use of students as a resource for professional learning and continuous reflection on teaching practices. Accordingly, the…

This paper presents and discusses findings from a European project concerning strengthening the teacher's voice in defining professional quality. In the project tools were developed and evaluated to help teachers reflect on their professional quality. Twelve countries participated and twelve tools were tested with help of student teachers,…

Learning about social justice is far different from engaging in the emotion-laden work of learning social justice. Frequently, instructors of aspiring educational leaders find that when social justice content is introduced, the adult classroom becomes a messy community, filled with untidy and unexamined viewpoints, multiple stereotypes, and…

The purpose of this article is to both introduce and describe the use of an equity audit investigation to prepare students in an educational leadership doctoral program for social justice leadership. The course setting where the equity audit served as the culminating activity is described. The authors also report on a five-question, open-ended…

Professional learning communities among teachers and schools have been envisioned as a mechanism for development, knowledge building and implementation. However the formation of an effective learning community is more complex than giving teachers a project and asking them to share a room. This paper reports a synergistic interaction between a…

David Booth, a renowned storyteller and educator, conducted a one-day Saturday conference that focused on reading comprehension. The day consisted of three one-hour sessions that discussed and demonstrated effective comprehension classroom techniques with elementary school students. This conference was conducted at a public college in New York…