The purpose of this study was to investigate elementary music teachers' perceptions of paraprofessional participation in the classroom and to examine the extent to which instructors provided preparation for their paraprofessional colleagues. Five hundred and four members of the National Association for Music Education completed a 32-item survey…

Previous research indicates that many children have difficulty transitioning from preschool to kindergarten, which may be attributed to differences between the two settings. The purpose of this study was to investigate preschool and elementary school educators' perceptions of the similarities of and differences between the two types of settings…

Research on teacher professional learning communities (PLCs) has found that part of their benefit comes from increased collegiality. And yet, while the nature of such collegiality is theoretically multifaceted and includes a combination of instrumental, expressive and substantive relationships, this multidimensional nature of PLCs is almost never…

Systems thinking is the ability to reason about biological systems in terms of their characteristics and can assist students in developing a coherent understanding of biology. Literature reports about several recommendations regarding teaching systems thinking, while it seems that systems thinking has not reached classroom practice. The main aim…

Increasingly, academics are engaging with the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL). However, within United Kingdom higher education, the definition of and activities that constitute SoTL remain open to debate. In this article, we explore SoTL through four career histories that give insight into how SoTL has developed and played a role in…

Teacher collaboration continues to be deeply grounded within effective professional development. Teacher teams, where small groups of teachers work together in teaching and learning, have become progressively more popular and are considered one of the most effective approaches to improvement and growth. However, teacher teams are situated within a…

The rise of innovative learning environments, with multiple teachers and larger cohorts of students, can de-privatise practice as teachers have the opportunity to observe each other teaching. However, they also provide the opportunity for collaboratively planning and teaching, and engaging in reflective dialogue about specific pedagogical…

There is little empirical research related to the readiness and capacity of academics for team-based collaboration. This case study used the existing literature about collaboration as a term of reference to examine the perceptions of a group of academics engaged in course design and how prepared they were individually and as teams for…

Teacher professional learning has been recognised as a critical contributor to improving teaching quality and securing student learning. Leadership at different levels is important for professional learning in schools. Job-embedded teacher professional learning occurs in collaborative activities that include co-teaching, action research, and…

The central issue of this article is teachers' experiences with the inclusion of pupils with special educational needs (SEN) in primary and lower secondary schools, both in terms of the teachers' own challenges and the situation of the pupils. The study is based on semi-structured interviews with general and special education teachers in four…

This study investigated participants' conceptions of the ideal mentor and mentee in the Finnish model of peer-group mentoring (PGM). Existing mentoring research emphasises dyadic practices, yet there is a lack of investigation of participants' roles in group mentoring. The main concepts of this inquiry were "dispositions"…

Effective mentor-mentee pairings tend to increase mentees' efficacy and motivation, bolster commitment, enhance instructional quality, and positively enhance student achievement. In response to situations in which school-provided mentoring is not possible or where music mentees receive a school-assigned, non-music mentor, an increasing number of…

This article describes the qualitative study of the redesigning of a course based on the Canadian "4CO-teaching method" for student teachers. This method consists of four different phases of co-teaching: co-design, co-execution, co-debriefing, and coreflection. Through this way of co-teaching, student teachers in both primary education…

Kappan's editor-in-chief talks with renowned scholar Susan Moore Johnson about her extensive research into the professional lives of public school teachers. For decades, studies have shown that teaching tends to be isolating work, with few opportunities for teachers to collaborate with and learn from each other or to play meaningful roles in…

The purpose of this study was to examine the relationships among middle school teachers' beliefs about collaboration, their rationale for using common formative assessments, and teacher characteristics that can explain these relationships. Seventy-six middle school teachers from two middle schools participated in the study. Findings indicate that…