Bruce Joyce has long been involved in efforts to develop collaborative professional inquiry. In this article, he looks back at some of those efforts in the hope that we can draw lessons from them and finally realize the vision that Mike Schmoker set forth in his February article. In the article featured on the cover of the February Kappan, Mike…

This paper reports on a teaching innovation where groups of experienced and novice teachers collaborated in analyzing case studies involving the education of students with special learning needs. The teachers collaborated in an asynchronous computer conferencing system (Web Knowledge Forum). All participants were enrolled in special education…

Scotland's "Assessment is for Learning" initiative (AifL) seeks to introduce a co-ordinated national system for assessment in schools. Formative assessment is a major plank in this. The initiative has moved beyond its pilot phase and it is intended that it will be adopted by all Scottish schools by 2007. This article draws upon the…

The Center for the Teaching of American History at Binghamton University has launched several programs that are designed to improve the quality of teaching history in the local schools. Central to this improvement has been the success of the summer workshops for teachers and librarians. Among the desired byproducts of this success have been…

Technology can be used to effectively support FLCs. This chapter explores how technology and a community of inquiry model can be used to facilitate individual reflection and critical discourse about teaching practice. (Contains 2 tables and 1 figure.)

This article examines ways in which entities external to schools, in this case for-profit educational management organizations (EMOs), can influence development of school professional community. Drawing on case studies of six charter schools operated by three EMOs, we examine the five elements of professional community described by Kruse, Louis,…

We analyzed the collaborative process of mathematics and vocational-technical education (VTE) instructors in eight sites, located across the United States, as they developed one authentic, integrated mathematics curriculum unit. Over two years, we collected data on teachers' viewpoints on instruction, integration, and mathematics/VTE reforms. Site…

This paper describes a 10-year collaboration between a teacher educator and a high-school science teacher as they investigated different ways to gather student feedback to enhance teacher reflection. Four different procedures were developed during this time: (i) interviews by a teacher educator with students; (ii) learning logs written by…

The data received from a survey conducted in six Georgia school districts, partners in the Georgia Systemic Teacher Education Program (GSTEP) is examined and used to help create support and professional development for new teachers. The building of collaborative structures that offer new teachers the chance to interact with more experienced…

In his February 2004 Kappan article, Mike Schmoker called into question the effectiveness of many of the major reform efforts of the past two decades. In particular he made the case that strategic planning efforts and whole-school reform efforts have been mostly ineffective because planning cycles are too long and implementation is too complex and…

This article presents initial findings from an evaluation research study of the implementation of a Web-based decision support tool, the Quality School Portfolio (QSP), developed at the National Center for Research on Evaluation, Standards, and Student Testing (CRESST) at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). The study focused on…

This article tells the story of young second-grade teacher and her quest to help students reach the New York state standards in reading. It is the yearlong story of significant professional growth highlighted by the conversations surrounding student learning. The collaborative conversations between the teacher, her colleague, and her staff…

This article describes the collaborative work of three teachers -- two Arab and one Jewish -- as they taught first grade together in a then new bilingual/bicultural school in Israel. The article is based on an ethnographic study the author conducted at the school during the school's first year (1998-1999), examining in particular the interactions…

Research on new teachers identifies two critical challenges in relation to how novices view their students: practice shock that results in an over focus on controlling students and a cultural mismatch that causes novices to see diversity as a problem. This article explores how mentoring strategies intervene at this critical phase, influencing…

This paper examines teachers' perceptions of their professionalism under conditions of educational reforms in government primary schools in Karachi, Pakistan. Conceiving teacher professionalism in terms of four dimensions (teacher efficacy, teacher practice, teacher leadership and teacher collaboration) it reports a quantitative survey research…