If teachers are expected to change their teaching behaviors, attitudes, and beliefs, they need to be involved in interactive, sustained, job-embedded approaches to learning. Research shows how the brain works and what reinforcements it needs to retain information and translate that to practice.

What would a school look like if it were designed with teachers' needs in mind, a building created with the idea of fostering professional learning along with student learning? As more schools are being updated or replaced, the opportunity exists not only to ask the question, but also to make changes that foster teacher learning.

Using recent experience at Carleton College in Minnesota as a case history, the authors offer a model for assessment that provides more flexibility than the well-known assessment feedback loop, which assumes a linear progression within a hierarchical administrative structure. The proposed model is based on a double helix, with values and feedback…

A strong international dimension has always been and is increasingly becoming an essential ingredient of the university. This article investigates the state of and prospects for internationalisation of an extremely peripheral and historically marginalised South African university. Questionnaires and semistructured interviews with academic and…

Distance education is changing the landscape of higher education and many faculty are now developing Web-based courses. This paper describes the lessons learned by the authors' experiences and research and offers a specific set of pedagogical and assessment strategies that they have found to be successful in online settings. The authors have found…

A group of teacher educators adopted collaborative teamwork to cope with a too large teaching load. The authors reflect on the experience of working together in a critical friendship group, highlighting the role that conversation plays in this process. The experience of a collaborative approach and its impact on teaching and professional…

Reforming traditional practice has proven to be a difficult and controversial task in the field of education. If a change to the school's organizational structure is not implemented in the appropriate manner, it can severely damage the reputation of the leadership team and possibly cost the administrator his or her job. Considering the possible…

This article is concerned with the effects that growing numbers of mature students have on the pedagogical practices of lecturing staff in the Institutes of Technology in Ireland. It is predicted by the Commission on the Points System and Mature Students that mature student enrolment may reach 15% by 2006, increasing to 25% by 2015. Lecturers in…

This work summarizes results from three studies of the current state of higher education faculty development in Russia. Positive aspects include its support for societal change, content focus, regularity, systematic nature, governmental support, established tradition, encouragement of graduate work, career-long continuity, institutional control,…

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…

Reflective dialogue is still very much an unexplored area in teacher education in Pakistan. This article presents findings of a study that engaged four teachers in the process of reflective dialogue in a school in Karachi, Pakistan. It explores the teachers' response to the process and possible reasons. It also examines the role played by those…

The central premise underlying teacher certification is that--no matter what their qualifications are--anyone who has not completed the specified training is unsuited to enter a classroom and must be prohibited from applying for a job. Presumably, the danger is that, in a moment of weakness, a school official otherwise will mistakenly hire such an…

"Wiki", the Hawaiian word for quick, can refer to either a Web site or the software that runs it. Ward Cunningham, a Portland, OR, programmer, invented and named the wiki in 1995. He wanted to help a virtual community of programmers communicate efficiently. Teachers and librarians nationwide have begun to explore the role of wikis in…

Although the continuity of faculty is an important factor in sustaining an institution's general education program, if the measure is attainment of learning outcomes, qualitative considerations, and not a faculty member's employment status, are more important in determining who should teach such courses. This author argues that relatively junior,…

States have fashioned wildly different ways of judging whether teachers already in the classroom meet the federal standard of "highly qualified," raising the possibility that teachers in some states will not face the high hurdle that Congress intended. However, to be deemed highly qualified under the federal law, teachers must hold a…