This paper examines the impact of one leadership development programme, drawing on a model developed by Leithwood and Levin (2004) for the Department of Education and Skills. The New Visions programme, offered by the National College for School Leadership, is aimed at new headteachers and adopts a process rich approach to leadership development.…

Teaching practicum requires a philosophy to give directions to values and actions. The philosophy proposed here aims for the development of a reflective and reflexive learner who learns through situational analyzing, theorizing, hypothesis testing, inquiring, experimenting, and justifying. Such development has to be built around the searching and…

Action learning programmes are supposed to result in both personal and organizational development. However, organizational development can be negligible because, as the term implies, a connection must be secured between what has been learned by action learning participants and other members of an organization. Here, the facilitation and analysis…

The challenge of tackling the problem of coping with work related stress in a National Health Service (NHS) Trust was undertaken. Ideas were developed within the context of two different action learning sets and led to actions resulting in a large therapy Taster Session event and the establishment of a centre offering alternative therapies and…

Young women, who have many options today, must want to teach, and they must be prepared to do so. Higher standards for beginning teachers and fewer jobs have made teaching as a career more competitive. As any experienced teacher knows, however, there is no way one can be fully prepared for dealing with the complexities of teaching. Translating…

This paper presents a case study which illustrates the author's experience as a sole proprietor taking on the collegial roles of both learning partner and coach, using an evaluation capacity-building strategy she called an evaluation learning circle (ELC). Facilitating the ELC was one of a variety of tasks she conducted as part of a multiyear…

This article explores instructionally useful assessment in the social studies. In the first section, the concept of usefulness is discussed as a function of the alignment between goals, instruction, and assessment. Next, three approaches to instructionally useful assessment are reported, followed by a case scenario suggesting how these disparate…

This case study examines an initiative at the University of Hawai'i at Manoa's College of Education with the mission of improving schooling for children, mostly Native Hawaiian, of the Wai'anae Coast of O'ahu. The study reports how the initiative recruits, supports, and prepares new teachers for the particularities of this specific location as…

This study demonstrates how value-added research undertaken at the local education authority (LEA) is used directly by heads and teachers in their efforts to raise standards in schools. It draws on a decade of experience of supporting schools in the effective use of performance data for school self-improvement. The article highlights the various…

A persistent and pressing problem in higher education is the "us versus them" mentality between faculty and administrators. Although the tension between faculty and administrators can have a healthy dimension (promoting the advice and consent of shared governance), by and large the tension is unproductive because it is based on misunderstandings…

This paper provides an overview of the Home-School Knowledge Exchange Project and an introduction to this special issue on home-school knowledge exchange. The paper starts by situating the project within a number of contexts--those of UK educational research, national and international interest in home-school relationships, national and local…

Documentation lets teachers visibly assess children's interests and abilities and serves as a tool for recording, reflecting, and supporting children. It also provides parents, children, and others a window into what is happening in the classroom. In The Children's School, the laboratory school at Mills College, teachers are always in search of…

Differences between researchers and practitioners can be found in four areas: the distance from the object of study; the ideological perspective; the purposes of the research; and the political agenda behind the research. Each of these principles dominates the perceptions of the people involved and thus contributes to the phenomenon of mutual…

The Idaho Comprehensive Literacy Assessment (ICLA) is a faculty-developed, state-wide, high-stakes assessment of pre-service teachers' knowledge and application of research based literacy practices. The literacy faculty control all aspects of the test, including construction, refinement, administration, scoring and reporting. The test development…

Although research identifies a plethora of evidence-based instructional practices, classroom teachers find research difficult to access, often not implemented due to perceived lack of relevance to classroom practice. Bridging this gap between research and practice requires continued and mediated support as teachers translate and contextualize…