Facilitating schools to develop more collaborative cultures is seen as one of the major challenges in promoting teachers' continuing professional development. This article recounts how a fifteen-month project designed to promote greater collegial learning and professional development emerged and developed within one school. Evidence suggests that…

Set against an organized school reform backdrop, this inquiry features four challenges I faced as a result of working alongside teachers and principals whose urban schools were awarded major school research grants for a 5-year period. In addition to teasing out the origins of the dilemmas I encountered and showing how they impacted my teaching…

This paper examines the pedagogic learning of a group of new lecturers at an international research intensive university who were participants on a formal teaching development programme. The lens of situated learning theory is utilised to gain new insights into the learning arising from the development programme but also to reveal certain…

This article focuses upon an evaluation of attendance issues within a local education authority (LEA) following two critical Office for Standards in Education (Ofsted) reports. After the publication of these reports, the contract and responsibility for managing schools, and the former LEA's remit, was awarded to a private company. As part of the…

Union Learning Representatives (ULRs) are a relatively recent phenomenon and are a new category of lay representation within the workplace in the United Kingdom. They are part of the present New Labour administration's drive to expand and improve lifelong learning and create the new "learning society"--in this case, particularly amongst…

This article presents empirical evidence from a follow-up study of schools which had been members of a school-based research consortium. It offers insight into the work of professional learning communities at the level of practice and so contributes to the growing research interest in probing their development. It investigates the extent to which…

Currently, in New Zealand, unprecedented numbers of teachers are involved in professional development activities, with, in essence, practice as the major focal point. In recent years, however, an increasing trend for primary teachers to undertake academic study towards a degree qualification has emerged. Although study towards a degree…

Changing educational priorities are reflected both in the literature and the models that seek to describe initial teachers' professional formation and learning. However, do new teachers' experiences conform to these models? A sampling of Hong Kong secondary school teachers over their first year as full-time teachers provides data from…

Teachers' career transitions and their positive as well as negative outcomes were left relatively untouched in the literature and research on education. In an effort to fill in gaps in knowledge, this paper reports the findings of a life story study that explored inter-school transitions during the career cycle of mid-career women teachers in…

Professional development practices implemented in rural school systems have often led nowhere. These practices seem to produce adult learning activities with few results other than participants' mounting frustration and another innovation left by the wayside. To encourage the development of productive professional development, many studies are…

Teacher beliefs are mediated and lived in the dialectic of teacher education and teacher practice. We reframe this dialectic of "teacher" preparation as "faculty" preparation, as many faculty are not prepared for the rigors of teaching, and most are not trained in the ethics of their profession. We propose a critical model of faculty development…

The authors report on a teacher survey that was conducted in North Carolina to determine the wants and needs of teachers in North Carolina. The survey had Likert-scaled quesitons about administrative support and professional development needs as well as information about professional and personal characteristics. The research was conducted to give…

The author discusses the case of Rose Freistater, a teacher at James Monroe High School. Freistater's application for her teaching license was rejected by the New York City Board of Examiners due to overweight. Although a number of overweight and underweight teachers were rejected by the Board of Education in the ten years that the standards had…

Writing achievement among young adolescents has become a significant concern. According to data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) (2000), writing achievement has not changed appreciably in the last 15 years. However, NAEP data suggest that teachers have increased the amount of time students spend writing. In other words,…

This article reports on the life history narratives of nine female EFL teachers working in higher education in Japan. An interpretive qualitative analysis of the stories suggested that gender cannot be viewed as a free-floating attribute of individual subjectivities but rather must be seen as one of many components in an ever-evolving network of…