Explores the extent to which academic offerings are serving the consulting industry and identifies ways that academia can help. The numbers of management consulting courses, field experiences in consulting and consulting concentrations by graduate business schools were tracked over a three-year period to assess the current state of offerings. A…

As part of the Department for Education and Skill's remodeling of the workforce agenda of 2003, the then Teacher Training Agency created a new "super teaching assistant" role that headteachers could integrate into their school organizations. This mirrored other government public service professional reforms, where there has been a…

In this paper the authors examine three main issues, which are directly linked to school management developments in South Africa since 1994: (1) school leadership and management; (2) professionalization of principalship through the South African Standard for Principalship (SASP); and (3) leading and managing the learning school. In exploring these…

The authors describe the first stages of NAEYC's new initiative, Supporting Teachers, Strengthening Families. This national initiative is intended to help early childhood professionals in preventing child abuse and neglect and promoting healthy social and emotional development. The article reports on responses about these topics from 1,800 early…

This paper reports on the use of a profiling instrument to evaluate an in-service professional development program for teachers of middle school numeracy. Two aspects of the use of the profile are reported. One relates to the aims of the profile to reflect Lee Shulman?s seven types of teacher knowledge and to measure change in teachers with…

This is a study of distributed leadership in the context of elementary schools' adoption of comprehensive school reforms (CSR). Most CSRs are designed to configure school leadership by defining formal roles, and we hypothesized that such programs activate those roles by defining expectations for and socializing (e.g., through professional…

This paper describes a qualitative research study that investigated strategies used by urban teachers to build their personal resilience. Sixteen resilient teachers from four urban districts that reported student achievement equal to or higher than the state average on standard tests of reading and mathematics were interviewed. The definition of…

This study investigated the effects of using a long-duration, project-based science professional development model on the acquisition of declarative knowledge and basic terminology associated with the use of geographic information technologies (GIT), teachers' self-assessed confidence in using GIT skills, and the implementation of GIT in…

The author describes the role of preschool supervisors. She provides insights into changes in the dynamics between a group of teachers and supervisors as a result of their joint participation in a six-month professional development course to help them enrich preschool literacy environments and reflect on teacher and supervisory practices. A list…

This paper evaluates the use of subject-based collegial mentors in an initial teacher development programme for new lecturers in a research-intensive UK university. The use of mentors is common in such programmes but their status tends to be that of critical friend and they have little formal influence in the programme. In the programme reported,…

Communities (including online communities) appear to provide powerful contexts for the professional development of teachers. Yet, despite the apparent educational potency of groups, professional development research has almost exclusively focused on describing and explaining the learning of individuals. In a world where technology supports…

This article focuses upon the development of transformative teacher professionalism. It explores issues of teacher professional identity and the ways in which this is contributed to by teacher responsiveness to the changing and demanding educational environments in which they find themselves. It includes a review of significant literature within…

David Booth, a renowned storyteller and educator, conducted a one-day Saturday conference that focused on reading comprehension. The day consisted of three one-hour sessions that discussed and demonstrated effective comprehension classroom techniques with elementary school students. This conference was conducted at a public college in New York…

Reflection is currently a key concept in teacher education. The reflection process is often described in terms of a cyclical model. In the present article, we explain how such a model can be used for supporting student teachers' reflection on practical situations they are confronted with, and on their behaviour, skills and beliefs in such…

Unlike many of her colleagues, the author was not "trying out" teaching as a profession. As early as elementary school, she knew she wanted to teach. Her commitment to teaching grew out of a basic commitment to social justice. From her own experience, she knew that whether or not a child receives a good education often hinges on the…