Literature on principal leadership in professional development offers important but underdeveloped conceptions of how school principals promote professional development for social justice. This article offers an empirically-based framework of the principal's role in professional development for social justice. An in-depth qualitative multicase…

Sparking a flame of mutual professional development at Twin Groves Middle School, in Illinois' Kildeer District 96 was a formative assessment. "Formatives," as the practitioners call them, are a technique usually adopted as a safety net for struggling students. But as districts are finding out, they are also effective at honing teacher…

This article discusses practitioner inquiry in a South African context. It begins by outlining the changing policy context in the country, particularly since the advent of democracy in 1994. The implications of these changes for practitioner inquiry are then discussed. The article explores some issues and dilemmas arising from this context,…

This article refers to a longitudinal case study of a primary school teacher over a period of 4 years. The focus is on the development of the teacher's beliefs regarding mathematics teaching and learning from the last year of her university studies up to the third year of teaching mathematics in school. This development has been investigated…

This case study examines how differing views on the teacher's role in school reform affected the work of a school-university partnership. The school district and the university had a history of partnerships and shared common general goals. Yet, as the partnership progressed, conflicting perspectives about teaching and the purpose of professional…

Teachers' attitudes, beliefs, values, and dispositions have a powerful influence on why teachers teach and why they remain in the profession in spite of difficult conditions that test their resolve. Conditions at the school and district levels and attitudes and actions on the part of teachers themselves are also crucial. School districts should…

This article presents a self-reflexive analysis of the complexities of conducting Afrocentric education research while living with a "double consciousness." Having been "called" to places that are considered to be "taboo" the author takes readers on a journey that begins in his busy mind and ends in on the African continent in a "rabbit hole."…

This study is a snapshot of a community of practice in operation. It reports a school-based professional development activity as a learning community with specific attention on one particular member, a "broker", who, by mediating the process of negation, helped bridge a huge knowledge gap regarding subject matter and school context between the…

Purpose: By trailing data collection and analytical methods this study aims to address the dearth of research into the use of attending off-site events for professional learning. Design/methodology/approach: Three events, for academics and school leaders, were studied. A range of methods was trailed during 2006-2007, with the aim of collecting…

This article highlights several key findings from the research project sponsored by the National Staff Development Council. Data and findings drawn from this study will be used to establish benchmarks for assessing progress in professional development over time. Taken as a whole, this work will provide the most comprehensive picture and…

Collaborative group work has great potential to promote student learning, and increasing evidence exists about the kinds of interaction among students that are necessary to achieve this potential. Less often studied is the role of the teacher in promoting effective group collaboration. This article investigates the extent to which teachers'…

Through this study we explored a community of practice framework applied to faculty professional development at a mid-size state university in order to examine the issues unique to discipline-specific professional development in higher education. Through content-focused professional development activities conducted by the authors, several key…

Inclusive education (IE) has been recognized as a key strategy to ensure education for all in the developing world for the last two decades. As a developing country, Bangladesh is striving to address IE by undergoing various initiatives such as policy reform, awareness creation and teacher development. This paper based on a qualitative approach…

Libraries across Australia are becoming increasingly involved in the development and implementation of family literacy programs, placing librarians at the centre of this initiative. "Better Beginnings" is a family literacy program developed by the State Library of Western Australian and delivered throughout the state. The program…

Cooperating teachers (n = 684) from 40 accredited programs rated the adequacy of their student teachers' competence and some features of the institution's student-teaching program. Their ratings were at the high end of a 5-point scale (4.0+) and showed that the teachers said that both their students and the program were more than…