An interdisciplinary professional development initiative targeted faculty teaching undergraduate liberal arts courses with the goal of enhancing the critical-thinking skills of learners. The authors emphasize innovative teaching strategies and educational technology. Results indicate that the institute promoted the adoption of learner-centered…

The National Staff Development Council (NSDC) has won recognition for the field of professional development. Researchers and education change agents acknowledge the importance of professional learning among strategies essential for reforming schools and raising teacher and student performance. The federal government, states, and school districts…

This chapter examines variables that make international education an essential component for community colleges and identifies barriers to institutionalization.

Understanding human activity in real-world situations often involves complicated data collection, analysis, and presentation methods. This article discusses how Cultural-Historical Activity Theory (CHAT) can inform design-based research practices that focus on understanding activity in real-world situations. I provide a sample data set with…

Northern Kentucky University's College of Education's faculty realizes that the infusion of technology into the teacher education program is important. Support for the infusion of technology was evident when the faculty adopted the ISTE Recommended Foundations for Teachers and a five-year technology plan in 1998. Interviews with the faculty during…

Qualitative methods can do much to describe context and illuminate the why behind patterns encountered in institutional assessment. Alone, or in combination with quantitative methods, they should be the approach of choice for many of the most important assessment questions. (Contains 1 table.)

This article explains a professional development experience of fifth to twelfth grade teachers in using geographic information systems (GIS) and global positioning systems (GPS) technologies to enhance classroom teaching and learning environments. A key challenge faced by the developers was whether teachers would value the technology tools enough…

Dr. Deirdre Burke is a Senior Lecturer in Religious Studies at the University of Wolverhampton's School of Humanities, Languages and Social Sciences, specializing in religious and genocide studies. She was a 2005 National Teaching Fellow of the Higher Education Academy that recognized and rewarded her individual excellence in teaching in higher…

In an effort to accommodate mandated standards-based assessment for measuring pre-service teacher quality, the Teacher Education Program at The University of Iowa has used for the last decade a web-based electronic portfolio system--ePortfolio[TM]--to help pre-service teachers document fulfillment of professional teaching standards throughout…

The purpose of this study was to explore enhancers and inhibitors that impacted 4 secondary physical education teachers to make changes in their programs. An interpretivist approach was used to understand the physical educators' change process. Data were collected from document analyses, participant information sheets, interviews, discussion…

After the collapse of the USSR, Kyrgyzstan became an independent Central Asian state in 1991. Since its independence, there have been enormous changes in the political, social and economic life of the young state, which strives to become a democratic and aspiring market-oriented economy. Its education system has also begun experiencing changes.…

The aim of this study is to increase knowledge about, and describe how, participants consider their own learning process and development during in-service education, and to consider how they attempt to implement their new knowledge in pre-school after completing the training programme. The sample consists of nine newly qualified pre-school…

Long-term influences of educational development initiatives for novice faculty members are seldom studied in a systematic way. In this exploratory study the long-term individual and institutional impact of a novice faculty training programme at the University of Antwerp (Belgium) was evaluated, using a written survey with open questions. The…

Creating opportunities to share student learning and assessment resources with faculty face- to-face can be a daunting challenge. At Northern Arizona University (NAU) in Flagstaff, Arizona, leaders representing six different service units and committees have developed a collaborative approach of "unite and conquer," in which the human,…

This study investigated the impact of logistical resources on the acceptability of student assistance team consultation to school staff. Elementary and middle school staff (N=113) completed a measure of the acceptability of prereferral intervention team procedures while also rating the importance of five logistical supports for effective team…