England's schooling landscape is being remodelled and the move from hierarchical to heterarchical modes of governance has implications for systemic change strategies. Balancing local and networked autonomy with centralising policies complexifies choices for schools, creating tensions that this article explores through the context of curriculum…

This paper examines the influence of professional learning communities (PLCs) on informal teacher leadership in Hong Kong schools to overcome issues reported in the literature on the challenges to teacher leadership posed by Chinese hierarchical school contexts. We test the relations among PLC, informal teacher leadership, teacher focus on…

This study investigated the noticing of teachers who teach mathematics at different grade levels in the context of lesson study. The study specifically focused on teachers' noticing during the planning phase of the lesson. For this, the lesson planning phase of a group of four teachers consisting of kindergarten and primary school 1st grade…

Legislation such as the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) and Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) have emphasized student achievement and test scores. As a result, the landscape of the kindergarten classroom has changed from a more play-based environment to a more academic-based classroom. This shift has caused pre-kindergarten to shift their practices as…

This three-year study aimed to investigate students' experiences with alternative seating practices (ASP) in a public-school string orchestra program. Whereas education scholarship has long demonstrated that democratic classroom seating arrangements play a crucial role in the learning process, typical orchestra classrooms maintain a hierarchical…

In this article, we use data from ethnography-inspired studies of eight Swedish schools. We describe and analyse how a number of neoliberal-inspired economic and political processes have (re)organised social and relational practices in local school settings. There is an increased focus on individuality in the everyday working lives of teachers,…

Teachers are frontline actors in actualising educational innovations. In some contexts, teachers' professional agency is undervalued. This study investigated teachers' agency and its related workplace affordances in Hong Kong, which features a centralised-decentralisation education governance system, and a hierarchical work culture. The study was…

Teacher professional learning plays a critical role in education reform by enabling teachers to refine their professional skills and keep up with changing content knowledge, pedagogy, and trends in schooling. This study examines how and under what conditions principal instructional leadership contributes to teachers' professional learning in…

This article examines the connections between information overload and time pressure, as well as between organizational patterns as they are perceived by school faculty, contingent upon the level of the specific educational framework (elementary-high school) and teachers' roles within the school. The participants were 539 teachers. The main…

Mid-level roles in education have been widely explored, primarily in schools, but little research has been conducted during the systemic reform that involves creating a mid-level role between end units and the system. The present study explores the sense-making of early childhood leaders (ECLs) at the initial stage of their new role as mid-level…

The present study tested the possibility of operationalizing levels of knowledge acquisition based on Vygotsky's theory of cognitive growth. An assessment tool (SAM-Math) was developed to capture a hypothesized hierarchical structure of mathematical knowledge consisting of procedural, conceptual, and functional levels. In Study 1, SAM-Math was…

The instructional hierarchy offers a useful framework for targeting academic interventions. Within this framework, the accuracy with which a student reads might function as an indicator that the student should receive an intervention that focuses either on accuracy or on fluency. The current study examined whether the instructional level for…

To act and think, children and adults are continually required to ignore irrelevant visual information to focus on task-relevant items. As real-world visual information is organized into structures, we designed a feature visual search task containing 3-level hierarchical stimuli (i.e., local shapes that constituted intermediate shapes that formed…

This dissertation tests a dynamic assessment-based cognitive hierarchy model and attempts to identify mathematical concepts that predict student learning potential on more advanced mathematical concepts using the units from ST Math, a self-paced curriculum, for third, fourth, and fifth grade students. The quantitative analyses compared a…

The focus of this study was the developmental pattern of the ability to shift attention between global and local levels of hierarchical stimuli. Children aged 7 years and 11 years and 21-year-old adults were administered a task (two experiments) that allowed for the examination of 1) the direction of attention to global or local stimulus levels;…