Recent research literature suggests that students benefit from positive relationships with their teachers. Small high schools attempt to formalize expectations for such relationships through a variety of organizational structures, including the advisor role. As advisors, teachers work with a group of students in order to guide and support them.…

The Horizon Report series is the product of the New Media Consortium's Horizon Project, an ongoing research project that seeks to identify and describe emerging technologies likely to have a large impact on teaching, learning, research, or creative expression within education around the globe. This volume, the "Horizon Report: 2009 K-12…

Investigating University-School Partnerships: A Volume in Professional Development School Research, the fourth book in the PDS Research Series developed by the same editors, includes a collection of organized papers that represent the best and latest examples of practitioner thinking, research, and program design and evaluation in the field at the…

The present study investigated the effects of a continuing professional development (CPD) initiative that provided collaborative group work skills training for primary school teachers. The study collected data from 24 primary school classrooms in different schools in a variety of urban and rural settings. The sample was composed of 332 pupils,…

Problems and challenges faced by beginning teachers have been well documented in the literature and have created the need for teacher induction programs in all disciplines, including agricultural education. This paper used literature from inside and outside the agricultural education discipline to identify and describe best practices in teacher…

A teacher study group is a collaborative group organized by teachers to help them strengthen their professional development in areas of common interest. Groups provide an important structure for gaining autonomy and a major means for growing professionally while building communities of learners and providing avenues for self-actualization. This…

Schools need effective systems for supporting teachers in meeting students' individual needs and responding to school-wide problems. The Teacher Assistance Team (TAT) model is a school-based problem-solving group that supports teachers by analyzing student, classroom, or school problems and creating alternative strategies for resolving those…

This sourcebook is intended to help college administrators develop a strong peer review component for their faculty evaluation and development system. Part 1, an overview of peer review, provides arguments for peer review and briefly describes the process of establishing a peer review system. Chapter 1 reviews the tenets of effective evaluation of…

This paper explores a distributed leadership perspective on how leaders create contexts that build and support professional communities in schools. It is argued that professional community results from intentional coordination of social interaction among teachers through the design of structures in a situation of practice. School leaders put these…

This newsletter defines teacher leadership and offers concrete ways teachers can step forward, sometimes out of their comfort zones, into leadership roles. In most schools, traditional structures are in place that define certain teachers as leaders such as department heads and grade-level team leaders. Many schools also have a leadership team,…

This guide is intended as a resource for school administrators, school leadership teams, and other teacher leaders as they learn about implementing professional learning teams (PLTs) in their schools. PLTs are teams of four to six teachers who come together to help each other improve student learning by changing classroom instruction. This guide…

Much research links collaborative experiences to the professional development of teachers. The author of this study designed a project, called the Buddy System, which provided opportunities for teachers to observe one another in the classroom and to interact with one another collaboratively. The goal was to determine if these activities provided…

This case study documents the changes one urban secondary school English teacher made to improve the quality of her students' educational experiences, noting the impact of her school's participation in the Coalition of Essential Schools. The first section describes her transition from being a good conventional teacher to being a teacher-as-coach,…

This document outlines the development of an American Studies learning community in which a literature and a history professor created a framework for collaborative inquiry across the two disciplines. The learning community was situated within General Education requirements, and thus reflected the freshman course level. The community was linked…

This book describes an inquiry-oriented form of professional development--the New Teacher Group--which provides teachers with opportunities to engage in discussions with their peers about problems experienced in their professional lives. Blending school psychology and teacher education, the book adapts a consultee-centered consultation model…