Positive climates that encourage professional growth and teacher collaboration can bolster the impact of induction programs and may influence novice special education teachers' decisions to remain in teaching. As you plan induction programs, consider how Professional Learning Communities--the topic of this Brief--may be used to integrate special…

Beginning special education teachers have the same responsibilities as their more experienced counterparts. However, as these new teachers assume full teaching responsibilities they also must become familiar with district and school policies, curriculum, and assessment procedures. At the same time they are expected to build relationships with…

Research shows teacher collaborative learning to be a powerful vehicle to mobilise teacher instructional change and pedagogical practices, and to improve student achievement. For such undertakings to have positive impact, understanding the visible features of collaborative structures may not be sufficient to ensure sustainable practice. Instead,…

The study reported here concerns 4 years of collaboration between secondary school teachers and academic researchers, constituting an emerging community of inquiry into mathematics teaching. In the article, the process of forming of this community is discussed, focusing on the reflective activity developed by its members as well as the tensions…

Defined as "any systemic inquiry conducted by teachers... for the purpose of gathering information about how their particular schools operate, how they teach, and how their students learn" (Mertler, 2009), "action research" is empowering and professional research done by teachers to inform and improves their own practices. Although there are many…

How can you connect teachers in two different school districts, separated by more than 50 miles, on a weekly basis to provide ongoing professional development (PD)? The answer: videoconferencing. In this article, the authors describe their use of videoconferencing technology to support ongoing PD both within and across two school districts.…

In this paper, we discuss our approach to teacher-researcher collaboration and how it is similar and different from other models of teacher collaboration. Our approach to collaboration employed design experimentation (Brown, 1992; Design Based Research Collective, 2003) as a central method since it yields important findings for teachers'…

In 1997, the Individuals With Disabilities Education Act of 1990 was amended to require that assistive technology be considered when preparing an individual education program (IEP). This study explored involvement of Midwestern music educators in the IEP development process as well as their knowledge and attitudes regarding use of assistive…

The need to broaden the notion of literacy has been continually emphasized within the field of New Literacy Studies in recent years. This is necessary because of the advent of information and communication technology (ICT) in our everyday, school and workplace literacy practices. A broader notion of literacy is needed to pay attention to the…

Cooperation between English as a second or other language (ESOL) and content-area teachers, often difficult to achieve, is hard to assess linguistically in a revealing way. This article employs register analysis (which is different from, but complementary to, genre analysis) in a Systemic Functional Linguistic perspective to show how an ESOL…

This article reports on the results of a survey of 45 secondary mathematics cooperating teachers' perceptions of the primary purposes of student teaching and their roles in accomplishing those purposes. The most common purposes were interacting with an experienced, practising teacher, having a real classroom experience, and experiencing and…

Unlike many other countries, Norway has no induction programme or reduction of teaching load for newly qualified teachers. However, an interesting model has been developed through the "New Teachers in Norway" project. This project involves teacher education institutions and schools, novice and experienced teachers as well as teacher…

The purpose of this study was to investigate factors that contribute to teachers' sense of community within public, urban, elementary schools. Because previous research has touted the benefits of teacher communities within schools (Kruse, 2001; Leana & Pil, 2006; Ware & Kitsantas, 2007) educational leaders are challenged with creating…

The purpose of this study was to illustrate the collaborative development of a teacher training program for teachers who have a child with cancer in their classroom. Five hundred twenty-eight kindergarten through 12th grade public school teachers were surveyed to identify their training needs. Based on these needs a computer-based training program…

Although collaborative teacher education programs have grown in number over the past two decades, we still do not understand the ways in which these programs, or the practices in those programs, improve the preparation of inclusive teachers. At a time when teacher education's viability is being questioned, it is problematic that little information…