As an off-campus-based professor and student teaching coordinator, the author's role is to place a group of student teachers, observe them in their student teaching assignments, and teach their seminar class, which meets once a week in the late afternoon. An aggressively immature student teacher severely tested the patience of the author and his…

Collaboration in the library need not always follow the standard pattern of "one" library media specialist working with "one" core teacher. Why not toss an art or drama instructor into the mix and watch the fun and excitement intensify? In this day of testing and curriculum standards, creative projects involving several staff members are too often…

The purpose of this study was to assess, plan, and implement a budget building process through collaboration with the stakeholders of a targeted school district. The research question of this study was, "Will allowing the stakeholders more input, autonomy, and collaboration during a budget building process build a team environment and…

This article discusses a new approach to knowledge translation using Web 2.0 technologies in an online Community of Practice (CoP). The purpose of the CoP is to promote wisdom-based action, a process that encourages people to engage with knowledge, match it to their own values, vision, and contexts, make a well-informed decision, and act on that…

At a recent conference sponsored by the National Science Teachers Association on Professional Learning Communities in Science, I was reminded how crucial it is for teachers to continually examine their practice. As one new to teaching physics, you may be overwhelmed by the task of helping your students develop accurate understanding of the…

"Practitioner research" is an ongoing, reflective process in which inservice teachers (i.e., practitioners) ask questions about their day-to-day teaching practice, develop plans of action to investigate these questions, draw conclusions supported by evidence as they gather, and use what is learned to facilitate changes in their pedagogy.…

In this study we examined the relative importance of teachers' psychological states, school organizational conditions (teacher collaboration and participative decision making), and the leadership practices (vision, individual consideration, and intellectual stimulation) of principals at their schools in explaining variation in teachers'…

As teachers struggle to meet the needs of a highly diverse student body, technology holds out the promise of a solution. However, first the nature and scope of differences between students has to be identified. This study (n = 1811) takes a comprehensive approach, selecting differences from each stage in the learning process. These were termed…

Twenty years ago, when the late Albert Shanker, then president of the American Federation of Teachers, endorsed the notion of innovative schools operating outside conventional district bureaucracies, his aim was to put teachers at the helm. Fast-forward two decades from Shanker's then-radical proposition and there are nearly 80 teacher-governed…

New faculty members are traditionally indoctrinated into a system that demands that they write incessantly and successfully publish their manuscripts. Yet they typically are not offered help in navigating the publishing process. For junior faculty members who have little experience with scholarly writing beyond their doctoral dissertations, these…

Researchers posit that teachers' teaching and learning are improved by teachers' collective efforts to examine and reflect on practice. Yet the questions of what and how teachers learn when collaborating with colleagues remain unanswered: What kinds of knowledge and skills do teachers acquire in conjunction with their collaboration? What brings…

The research to practice gap continues to be a prominent concern among professionals in the field of education. Traditional staff development in which teachers attend presentations and workshops for a few days each year has been one method for attempting to bring empirically validated instructional practices into the classroom. Unfortunately,…

Purpose. The purpose of this study was to describe to what extent seven collaborative behaviors were demonstrated by general education teachers assigned students with disabilities, special education Resource Specialists, and the principals in selected California elementary schools that met their 2006-2007 and 2007-2008 English language arts annual…

In this study, I explored the impact of collaboration and capacity building during the design and implementation of a teacher-developed middle grades Language Arts Literacy curriculum. Participants included ten teachers and a literacy coach. We developed skill-based thematic units incorporating identified strategies designed to increase student…

In this article we investigate educational leadership as a site of practice, utilising the notion of "practice architectures" as our lens. The latter shifts Etienne Wenger's more individualising notion of 'learning architectures' to a broader study of the systems and organisations that prefigure educational practices and potentially,…