A third-grade teacher and an English-as-a-second-language (ESL) teacher collaborated to ensure the academic success of English language learners through "a priori" teaching. The ESL support teacher used verbal and interactive strategies to pre-teach key concepts, skills, and academic language relevant to the subject matter being covered…

Building partnerships to improve students' performance (Fitzgibbons 2004, Small 2002) is not a new concept to the education profession. Borrowing tenets from the business world and universities, schools have come to realize that interdisciplinary collaborations enhance the cohesiveness and achievement of the particular school and district as a…

This article is part of a series of articles edited for this issue of "Childhood Education" relating to varying viewpoints and teaching strategies across the continuum of age groups, from early childhood to graduate education. Within this article the editors provide the text of an article written by a retired teacher educator whose…

Library media specialists have been collaborating with classroom teachers for years and have long been advocates for tying the classroom curriculum to the library media center in real-world ways. Current reading research focuses on the many aspects of learning to read, including phonics and alphabet recognition, vocabulary building, fluency, and…

Sociocultural and cultural-historical theories urge us to study the social relations and interactions of faculty embedded in local and particular contexts. They promise deeper insights into the work of college and university faculty.

In this article, the authors--the teacher educators who obtained a grant from the Arthur Vining Davis Foundations (AVD)--explore what it meant for teachers and teacher educators involved in the PorTRAIT (Practitioner or Teacher Researchers As Inquiring Travelers) program to enlarge their views of teacher research and their own classrooms by being…

To date, most of the literature on the use of cohort groups in teacher education has focused on the benefits and limitations of the use of cohorts within teacher education programs. This study extends this knowledge base by exploring the sources of these underlying tensions by soliciting qualitative reflections of faculty. The purposes of this…

Training is conducted to establish kids who are confident, critical, trying to ask questions and who recognize when something doesn't make sense. Some of the ways in which the second-grade teachers support the mathematics learning of the diverse group of students in their class is explored.

Teachers at two urban elementary schools with a history of low student achievement in reading met in weekly study groups to engage in structured dialogue about teaching practice. These groups were established through the support of the Urban Literacy Institute, a joint project of Wright State University in Dayton, Ohio, and the Dayton, Ohio,…

Recent research links the development of a collaborative community of educators to enhanced teaching and learning effectiveness. This study contributes to this research by testing a work group effectiveness model with a sample of teachers from middle school teams. The study assesses the interrelationships among the model's antecedent variables…

Academic, vocational, and special educator high school teams participated in a year-long, business-, school-, and university-based institute on integrated academic/occupational learning. We describe the Institute and examine its impact on teachers' beliefs and practices. Based on analyses of teachers' discussions, interviews, written products, and…

This article describes results of a study investigating the potential of using social network analysis to evaluate programs that aim at improving schools by fostering greater collaboration between teachers. The goal of this method is to use data about teacher collaboration within schools to map the distribution of expertise and resources needed to…

This article describes the experiences of two US teacher groups and their lesson study work. Their stories illustrate some of the dynamics and promise of teacher change spurred by lesson study. The first case is primarily about teacher efficacy, as a group of teachers discover through lesson study that their planning and work can have an impact on…

This study is an investigation of the impact of collaborative teaching by student-teachers and classroom teachers on children's enjoyment and learning of science. The paper describes findings from a project in which undergraduate science specialist student-teachers were placed in primary schools where they 'co-taught' investigative science and…

A multiyear collaboration engaging key educational partners set out to understand how it was that English-language learners attending public schools that had the potential to serve as centers of excellence came to demonstrate relatively strong levels of performance on New York City and New York State standardized tests. This article describes what…