This article provides an opportunity to extend the discussion about teacher communities as part of complex school reform models, specifically centered on those communities whose membership is drawn on a semi-voluntary basis. Through a sixteen-month long ethnography, I document the activities of an urban teacher professional community (TPC) at a…

The attrition rate of 1st-year special education teachers is a mounting concern. Researchers have identified several factors that contribute to the stress that many novice teachers experience and their subsequent attrition. If necessary support from mentors, colleagues, and administrators is not in place, many 1st-year teachers opt to leave the…

One of the most important functions of a teacher is to help students make important connections between the subject matters they study. Too often, the different curricular subjects, such as social studies, language arts, math, and science, are presented to students in a vacuum. Accordingly, many students leave school without ever noticing the…

Mentoring is often portrayed as an unqualified good. Teacher educators claim that mentoring holds promise for beginning teacher development, increased retention of novice teachers, and mentor-teacher improvement. Drawing on positioning theory, this study describes negotiation of power and position in a failed triad composed of a public school…

The purpose of this article is to examine the teacher research movement from the perspective of three generations of teacher researchers within the context of a unique collaborative science teacher action research group. The question that guided the study was the following: In what ways do three generations of science teachers perceive their…

Teacher Research Groups (TRGs) provide one means of creating learning communities among teachers with the express purpose of systematically examining practice and enriching teachers' knowledge about learning and teaching. These groups meet regularly, may be facilitated by a more experienced peer or university researcher, assist teachers with the…

This study presents three case studies of teacher candidates in a Masters in Teaching (MIT) Program who interned in a well-established middle school Professional Development School (PDS) in Washington State. Each of the three portraits reveals how student teachers can positively influence the learning outcomes of middle school students by bringing…

Recent literature regarding functional behavior assessment (FBA) in general education environments has been critical of the paucity of research in such settings, given the complex and often time-consuming nature of FBA. Less complex team-based FBA processes have been suggested as a realistic alternative for general education environments. This…

The study that we report in this paper, named as learning study, is a hybrid between a design experiment as characterized by Brown and Collins, and a Japanese lesson study as characterized by Yoshida, and Stigler and Hiebert. This paper aims at tracing the development of the learning study and examining its impact on teacher professional learning,…

In this self-study we examine our collaborative practice across two undergraduate early childhood education methods courses. Framed by our larger question of how teachers and teacher educators do school, we drew on multiple data sources to investigate how we were modeling teaching, listening, and learning to and with these students in our science…

Collaborative problem solving is an activity in which special education teachers and other school professionals work together to solve the academic or behavioral problems of their students. The purpose of this study was to understand preservice teachers' perceptions of a collaborative problem solving activity they implemented with other…

The article focuses on the use of information and communication technology (ICT) for strengthening and transforming university practice in line with the social and technological conditions of the new ideas for "interactive" universities. The purpose is to use ICT as a change-agent in order to establish new practices--new pedagogical…

Promoting collaboration skills and dispositions is widely encouraged currently in the field of teacher preparation. However, very few university classrooms incorporate collaboration into their assessment practices. One factor may be the perceived potential lack of soundness of such methodologies. This study is a qualitative examination of the…

In his sociological study Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (2000), Robert Putnam argues that Americans need to "reconnect to one another" and, both metaphorically and literally, go bowling together (p. 28). The authors--an English educator and a social studies educator--describe a four year collaboration that has led…

In this article, the author examines the character of the conversations generated in an elementary teacher group as they worked on mathematical problems together and analyzed their students' work. Two distinct forms of talk--"exploratory" and "expository"--were found. The first type of talk occurred most prominently when discussions centered on…