The purpose of this conceptual paper is to highlight the significance of pedagogical leadership (PL) in improving the quality of practice in early childhood development (ECD) centres. ECD in South Africa is defined as the procedures by means of which children from birth to 9 years grow and flourish emotionally, morally, socially, physically and…

This report explores District of Columbia Public Schools' innovative approach to supporting teaching instruction, called Learning Together to Advance our Practice, or LEAP. LEAP is based on research that has found the most effective professional learning is school-based and content-specific, grounded in the instructional materials and strategies…

Program managers frequently put staff training near the top of their lists of ongoing challenges. The mix of diverse, complex training needs in many programs means managers may be responsible for orienting new staff, implementing new administrative procedures, or facilitating steps toward long-term program improvement. The greatest underlying…

Despite the benefits of performance-based oral communication tests, a plethora of variables, as illustrated in Ockey and Li's (2015) model of oral communication assessment, can create construct-irrelevant variance in test scores. In relation to human participants in the oral communication tests, previous studies mostly focused on the direct effect…

This study investigated teachers' views, all from a Pacific Island context, of assessment practices as it relates to mathematics learning in early childhood, primary, and secondary settings. Based on the analysis of these views, collected via a written survey (n=25) from invited workshop participants in Nauru, a series of four mathematics…

Since the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) era many program improvement schools were prescribed Professional Learning Communities (PLC) professional development as a corrective action by their respective Local Education Agency (LEA). Despite the adoption and implementation of many corrective action measures (including PLCs) recommended by LEA's, the…

Just as a compass orients a traveller, the OECD Learning Compass 2030 indicates the knowledge, skills, attitudes, and values students need not just to weather the changes in our environment and in our daily lives, but to help shape the future. The Learning Compass 2030 is composed of seven elements: (1) core foundations; (2) transformative…

This article addresses ways that literacy coaches can form and sustain effective working relationships with teachers. The author has combined firsthand experience as a literacy coach with a review of the literature as it pertains to teacher/coach relationships. There are several common themes that appear in the literature as advice for this aspect…

This chapter explores the opportunities and challenges of using direct methods to measure co-curricular learning.

The aim of this paper is to provide a way of teaching the factors that affect resistance using mechanical pencil leads and the brightness of the light given out by a light bulb connected to an electrical circuit. The resistance of a conductor is directly proportional to its length (L) and inversely proportional to its cross-sectional area (A).…

Declarative concepts (i.e., key terms with short definitions of the abstract concepts denoted by those terms) are a common kind of information that students are expected to learn in many domains. A common pedagogical approach for supporting learning of declarative concepts involves presenting students with concrete examples that illustrate how the…

Critical policy scholars have increasingly turned their attention to: (1) the work of policy actors engaged in globalised and globalising processes of policy formation, (2) the global flows or movements of education policies across multifaceted, hybrid networks of public-private agencies, and (3) the complex politics of global-national policy…

This study investigated performance under and preference for continuous and discontinuous work-reinforcer schedules in 3 students who had been diagnosed with autism. Under continuous schedules, participants completed all work and consumed all reinforcers in contiguous units. Under discontinuous schedules, work and reinforcer access were broken up…

Professor Shirley Alexander is the Deputy Vice-Chancellor and Vice-President (Teaching, Learning & Equity) at the University of Technology, Sydney. On 12 November 2014, an article of hers appeared in "The Conversation": "Buying essays: how to make sure assessment is authentic." That article traverses, in an abbreviated way,…

In this study, we examined one model of coaching, Support for the Improvement of Practices through Intensive Coaching (SIPIC), which draws from both direct and responsive models of coaching with classroom teachers. We found the model to be effective in improving the comprehension instruction of teachers and in raising the reading achievement of…