This article documents the authors' reflections on a teacher professional development programme conducted in 38 Hong Kong primary schools on the teaching of English through Process Drama. The authors draw upon the views of school principals, subject panel head teachers, English teachers, students and parents in focus group interviews to examine…

Dissemination of findings about the HIV epidemic at international conferences has been dominated by researchers from developed countries working in well-resourced and supported institutions. This has led to exclusionary practices where community healthcare workers and practitioners working in under-resourced contexts have had limited opportunities…

Five years ago, few would have predicted that expenditures for public education would be at the same levels, or perhaps even lower, particularly with growing numbers of "at-risk" students, rising accountability benchmarks, and a nationwide challenge of aging buildings and infrastructure. Yet, in these grim economic times, quality classroom…

Psychology internship and fellowship years are exciting yet challenging times of professional development, as geropsychologists-in-training transition to independent practice and work to consolidate their identities as professional geropsychologists. Geropsychology supervisors help interns and fellows to develop and refine attitude, knowledge, and…

The common belief among school librarians is that a flexibly scheduled school library program as opposed to a fixed schedule program is the best choice. After all, there are distinct advantages to the flexible program: students are served at the point of need, skills are not taught in isolation, and collaborative lessons are developed with…

Teacher study groups are often thought to be effective professional development structures. Such teacher communities may foster teacher learning through a collaborative culture and the codification of group members' collective knowledge. However, not all study groups are effective professional development. This article is a discussion of factors…

In the past 3 decades, the concept of professional community has gained considerable momentum in the theoretical and empirical studies in this field. At the same time, the concept has faced conceptual and methodological difficulties in that as yet no universal definition has been formulated and that its operationalization differs in the various…

This article presents a theoretical argument for assuming that schools have an orientation to learning that influences both whether teachers learn and also whether they change professionally as a result of the learning. This school-level orientation to learning is hypothesized to consist of beliefs and practices about learning. Results from a…

This study examined the effects of the inclusion of online follow-up and online peer interaction with a face-to face workshop on quality of support plan and completion of a support plan by Texas school librarians. The study used a posttest-only control group experimental design with randomly assigned self-selected participants. Three online…

This two-year school-wide initiative to improve teachers' pedagogical skills in inquiry-based science instruction using a constructivist sociocultural professional development model involved 30 elementary teachers from one school, three university faculty, and two central office content supervisors. Research was conducted for investigating the…

The purpose of the study was to explore a conceptual structure of graduate teaching assistant (GTA) teaching concerns. Results indicated that GTAs experience five distinct, inter-related types of concerns: class control, external evaluation, task, impact and role/time/communication. These "teaching concerns" were further analysed by…

Teacher professional development is a key factor for transforming professional and school culture. This article describes a case study undertaken in a Spanish school during the 2007-2008 academic year. Our aim is to explain how action research methodology was applied to encourage professional and school culture towards an intercultural and…

Corporate Learning and Development must align learning goals with the needs of the business it serves. In times of rapid change and limitless information, it becomes unreasonable to expect a Learning and Development group to design for and deliver all the learning its workforce needs. In response, corporate learning leaders are exploring if and…

Through the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) Initiative, states and territories have collaborated in the development of a common core of standards in English Language Arts and mathematics for grades kindergarten through twelve that are now being adopted by states. Designed not only for the purpose of providing strong, shared expectations, the…

In this paper, the author aims to share some of the efforts, successes, challenges and lessons learned over approximately two decades of professional development projects both large and small. In retrospect the author contends that efforts toward change, improvement and advancement were always bumping against culture. So, this address attempts to…