This article describes how a group of small liberal arts college faculty embraced the opportunity to create a faculty learning circle as an alternative professional development program. We provide a review of the program, discuss the lessons learned, and offer recommendations for future efforts in developing a similar faculty development program.…

Educational professional development is a global concern. It is often characterised by event-delivery methods, though there are signs that other approaches are gaining favour. The authors stress the significance of non-formal learning, and the ways in which it can be promoted and enhanced within the activity systems within which teachers in higher…

What knowledge, skills and experiences combine to support leadership potential and desire? Are rich sources of human potential remaining untapped and untrained to the detriment of student learning, site-based effectiveness and renewal of the profession? A four-phase model of leadership development for teachers is proposed in this paper. (Contains…

Previous studies of the professional discourse of literary studies have focused solely on published scholarly articles and have produced contradictory evidence regarding the knowledge-building function of literary argument. In this study, 9 English department faculty members use a "think-aloud" procedure to read four lyric poems and compose a…

The development of people is the Queen Bee in relation to the growth and productivity of programs, institutions and countries. It is the centre of the concentric circle of sustained improvement. Personal and professional development evokes interest, motivation, and possibility. The development of people includes the development of self, of others,…

White teachers in Indian schools often find themselves unprepared for their task. They do not understand the history, culture, communities, and learning needs of their students. In this article, the author challenges these educators to become better teachers of Indian children and shares some of the lessons she learned about becoming a better…

Ethnography has the capacity to interrogate and unravel what Geertz called "webs of significance" in respect of difficult and perplexing cultural issues. One arena that is especially troubling at the moment lies in the need to pose questions and explore more robust explanations as to how it is that some teachers of young adolescents seem…

By looking at teacher collaborative structures in an urban public elementary school, this article demonstrates how, in the face of top-down school decisions under the pressures of high-stakes testing and assessment-driven curriculum, teachers can find the power and freedom for creative and effective pedagogy to flourish. We describe how teachers…

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,…

Background: It is widely claimed that critical reflection upon experience is a valuable process in which all teachers should engage in order to improve their professional practice. Assumptions are made about the benefits of reflection both for the teacher as person and professional; however, there is a lack of in-depth research on the reflective…

The central theme of this article is that teachers' professional development in England is not being taken as seriously as it needs to be. With reference to the induction of newly-qualified teachers and the early professional development pilot schemes, it draws on data from several related pieces of research, to argue that cases of…

Community colleges are under pressure from internal and external forces to recruit and retain minority faculty members. According to recent studies, approximately 90% of the total faculty at two- and four-year public and private colleges are white. The highest percentage of faculty of color are employed at public four-year institutions (12.6%) and…

At present, teachers' inservice training assumes an enormous importance in the realization of educational reforms in European countries. This paper describes several descriptive models for teacher training. Then, the development of inservice training is examined according to the "change paradigm" and the "problem-solving…

This digest discusses the use of faculty mentoring programs to empower faculty and ultimately benefit the institution and improve the quality of higher education. It refers to the literature on mentoring in terms of conceptual frameworks, mentoring arenas, and roles and functions of mentors and proteges. It briefly addresses the following aspects…

This report discusses the use of faculty mentoring programs to empower faculty and ultimately benefit the institution and improve the quality of higher education. It synthesizes the literature on mentoring in terms of conceptual frameworks, mentoring arenas, and roles and functions of mentors and proteges. The first section provides a general…