California's newly legislated Peer Assistance and Review Program will hopefully transform the state's teaching profession. PAR will serve as a catalyst for positive change in several areas: recognition of teaching as a lifelong developmental process; alignment of teacher development with standards; and creation of labor/management partnerships.…

Describes how a teacher and a teacher educator collaborated to extend their thinking regarding effective learning environments and to challenge their own uncertainties through dialog. Discusses four aspects of effective learning environments: creating authentic, meaningful, and personalized curriculum; making visible differences in language and…

Considers the potential impact of teacher training on specific practices and reform efforts in elementary and secondary schools who are using the World Wide Web. Describes a collaborative project involving teacher training courses at three universities, and concludes that preservice teacher Web-based collaboration has the potential to enhance…

Used interview data from beginning teachers, mentors, and principals to study the implementation of new arrangements for monitoring and supporting beginning teachers in England, examining the significance of teacher culture in their first teaching year. The new arrangements appeared to have made the greatest impact on schools where the culture was…

Discusses six questions to help teachers differentiate between the ability and performance of students with learning disabilities and those whose native language is not English. Describes experience with individual students. Recommends that ESOL and special-education teachers collaborate in diagnostic process. (Contains 11 references.) (PKP)

Drawing on the methodology of critical incidents, this study sets out to explore the perspectives that 20 experienced in-service mentors in Israel adopt towards critical incidents in their work, as they account for how they reason about and act upon these incidents. Mentors' stories of critical incidents shed light on the complex nature of…

Collaborative teaching is used in many college and university programs to foster student enthusiasm and inquiry and to promote interdisciplinary learning. A literature review reveals benefits and pitfalls, but it lacks sufficient information for instructing team teachers in planning collaborative courses. In this article, we outline suggestions…

This paper discusses several issues involved in educating at-risk students and particularly emphasizes school-university partnerships as a strategy for educational change. It proposes that educators move beyond the symbolic theory, the theory of resource dependence, or the theory of resource exchange and embrace school-university partnerships…

The school library media center has an abundance of resources for teachers and students, but library media specialists are frequently isolated, sometimes invisible, members of the faculty. In addition, many teachers mistakenly think of library media specialists as "the copyright police" or "The Controllers of Content" instead of collaborators. It…

This article describes a successful teacher-professor collaboration to plan interdisciplinary curriculum and team-teach it in a first-grade classroom. The goal was to use literature and drama to help children learn about and find meaning in African American experiences and perspectives. Writing, staging, and performing three plays about African…

This article discusses the Network of Performance-Based Schools, first developed in 1999, and how it answers a personal and professional desire shared to work together in multidisciplinary groups with the profit of learning. The development of the Network of Performance-Based Schools evolved out of a shared personal and professional desire for…

Teachers from a high school and university collaborated to analyze the obstacles students encountered while understanding the theatre play "Our Town". A description on the activities undertaken to help students approach and appreciate the play is presented.

This pilot project was designed to provide professional development to teaching assistants (TAs) and improve undergraduate instruction in an intensive Spanish course through the use of collaboration and experiential instruction. TAs improved their teaching strategies, learned techniques to solve classroom problems, and reported satisfaction from…

To investigate teachers' everyday on-the-job learning, I used a comparative case study design and examined the work of mathematics teachers in 2 high schools. Analysis of interviews, classroom observations, and teachers' conversations highlighted 3 key resources for learning: (a) reform artifacts oriented the teachers' attention to key concepts of…

Mentor-novice collaborative reflection about teaching is crucial to the development of novices' professional knowledge. However, few studies examine content and forms of mentor-novice conversations and opportunities that such interactions create for developing professional knowledge. Drawing on observation data from two U.S. and two Chinese…