Models of collaboration between teacher training institutions and Professional Development Schools have become commonplace in general teacher education. These partnerships are less well documented when it comes to special education teacher training, and are particularly scarce with regard to models of collaboration with special education schools.…

Excellent senior high school physics teachers are the backbone power in the new course reform of physics in China. The excellent senior high school physics teachers' professional growth actuality in Shandong is surveyed in this article by the self-made "Questionnaire of Excellent Senior High School Physics Teachers' Professional Growth",…

In order to move their organizations forward, many leaders are aware that they must have clearly defined goals, use data to measure progress toward those goals, adopt appropriate change management strategies, strengthen governance teams, and support the development of other leaders in the system (see, for example, Waters & Marzano, 2006). The…

For many decades, society has struggled with academic underachievement, particularly among African American males. Although a myriad of studies have identified significant causal factors of African American academic underachievement from the perspectives and circumstances of the student, limited studies focus on this problem from the perspective…

A challenge for educational employing authorities is the provision of high-quality, sustainable professional development opportunities that will lead to positive growth in teachers' pedagogical practices. The study reported here sought to devise and implement a model of teacher professional development that would result in such growth by…

This study examined D.W. Winnicott's construct object usage and related transformational metaphors from a cognitive-linguistic perspective. The paper "The Use of an Object" was positioned historically among extant theoretical models and employed to investigate the semantic evolution of key Winnicottian concepts. Biographical accounts revealed…

As with other fields in education, career and technical education (CTE) has experienced a dramatic transformation since its inception in the 19th century. Since the reauthorization of the Carl D. Perkins Career and Technical Education Act of 2006, there has been limited research on the impact, or possibilities, that recent legislation has had on…

General education induction has received substantial attention from policymakers, researchers, and school district practitioners. Yet, the literature base has been described as fragmented, with methodological problems that often make it difficult to draw clear implications. The special education induction literature base is even less developed.…

Higher-order thinking is an instructional strategy supported by research. Often referred to as critical thinking skills, it is more than simple recall of facts or information. It is a function of the interaction between cognitive strategies, meta-cognition, and nonstrategic knowledge when solving problems. Higher-order thinking is based on the…

The purpose of this article was to describe students' experiences of community engagement in an Educational Psychology practicum in order to inform relevant educational psychology training literature with experiences of students' community engagement. Experiential learning served as our theoretical framework and we employed an instrumental case…

In teacher's idealized history classroom, students are abuzz with questions. They are eager to jump into a serious analysis of primary sources. They relish additional opportunities to engage historiographical debates. They are, as teachers like to say, "thinking historically." While there are few easy ways to create these idealized…

As part of a long-term program to develop effective, research-based professional development programs for physics graduate student teaching assistants (TAs), we first identify their current classroom practices and why they engage in these practices. In this paper, we identify a set of teaching practices we call "focusing on indicators,"…

Even with the best planning and supportive implementation, one's school will experience challenges to achieving its vision of increased rigor. One of today's most serious issues is how schools can improve when resources are stagnant or even declining. Virtually every school faces dwindling resources and is caught between the expectation that…

This article examines a little-discussed phenomenon in the study of both peer-to-peer collaborative networks and teaching with technology: that of teachers caught in the middle between open public networks as teaching resources and highly restrictive school policies regarding internet content and online access. Based on their experiences as…

In this work we study the meaning of professional development as a participative process within a community of practice. In this collaborative narrative self-study we look at the development of ourselves as a professional group working together in an intensive program. The study is based on personal career stories, each told by its author, but…