This article examines the in-house professional development program in a private school in Lebanon and the approach it adopts to train teachers on reflective practice. It identifies the contextual factors in the school that teachers perceive as supporting their professional learning of reflective practice, and investigates the teachers'…

This study explores the appropriateness of the Performance Assessment for California Teachers (PACT) as an instrument of assessing English-language arts (ELA) teacher candidates' effectiveness in a rural border community. Eight -candidates participated in the study. The findings call into question the adequacy of PACT to assess the candidates'…

In the summer of 2012, thousands of teachers across the United States attended several days of professional development workshops. The workshops, which focused on the Common Core State Standards, were part of a Tennessee Department of Education initiative in teacher leadership. The department recruited and trained 200 highly-effective teachers to…

This paper capitalizes on the addition of geocodes for Head Start centers in which children were randomly assigned to address questions about the role of neighborhood characteristics in moderating impacts of assignment to the Head Start program. Researchers explore the extent to which impacts of assignment to Head Start on outcomes for children…

How to teach about difference is critical to education. This paper discusses teaching about difference in locations or contexts where the majority of teacher candidates were of the dominant culture. As a teacher educator, I have worked with teacher candidates on becoming aware of the relationships between their subject positions and the subject…

Paradigms aid organizational researchers in their quest to find the "truth" of a particular event, phenomenon, activity, or topic and by providing them a framework with which to make assumptions about the nature of society and reality. According to Burrell and Morgan (1978), organizational researchers use one of four paradigms:…

In this article we reflect on developments in our thinking and practice concerning youth sexual offending. We put the case that context is critical to understanding and responding to the problem, and accordingly that a social ecological model provides the most suitable conceptual and practice framework for clinical efforts with this population. We…

Our educational system has always reflected the social, cultural, and economic conditions prevailing at the time. The impact of technological advances as well as global competition now impose a new agenda on higher education to ensure that all students can succeed in a complex and rapidly changing world. Fortunately, we have many resources to aid…

The tracking of entities in discourse is known to be a bimodal phenomenon. Speakers achieve cohesion in speech by alternating between full lexical forms, pronouns, and zero anaphora as they track referents. They also track referents in co-speech gestures. In this study, we explored how viewpoint is deployed in reference tracking, focusing on…

Unacceptable levels of adverse healthcare events, combined with changes to training, have put the spotlight on junior doctor decision-making. This study aimed to describe the decisions made by junior doctors and the contextual factors influencing how decisions were made and justified. Stimulated recall interviews with 20 junior doctors across five…

Current theories of novice teacher learning have not accounted for the varied influences of pedagogical training, subject matter knowledge, tools, identity, and institutional context(s) on the development of classroom practice. We examined how 26 beginning secondary science teachers developed instructional repertoires as they participated in two…

To a large extent education can be thought of as a communication process among the participants. This article focuses on distance education, which has both the general communication processes that in-person education venues possess, and also communication specific to the technologies that mediate the teaching and learning taking place at a…

Recent research on negation has demonstrated that while readers are aware that this text construction is difficult, they seem to be able to do little to improve their comprehension. The present research evaluated whether a change in typeface could improve comprehension and metacomprehension of negation. Results indicated that while readers were…

This article contends that opposition to professionalization has been led by writers from the United Kingdom and Europe who tacitly assume the (continued) presence of institutions that were a feature of the British context in the 1970s and early 1980s, and that still exist in modified form today. Most of these institutions are absent in the…

As a lifelong theater artist and educator, as well as practitioner of a variety of meditative techniques, this author has been keenly interested in the potential impact of sitting meditation and other contemplative practices on acting, vocal, and movement training in college and university performing arts departments. For many years, she wondered…