Examined the motivational effects of a teacher research initiative within an urban alternative school, studying participating teachers' self-efficacy, empowerment, collaboration, and perceptions of school climate via surveys, interviews, observations, and field notes. Growth occurred in general and personal teaching efficacies from pretest to…

The Alabama Reading Initiative is a public-private consortium promoting a research-based approach to literacy instruction. Its goal is 100-percent literacy. Use of the approach at one middle school involved development-, practice-, and demonstration-oriented professional development and deep faculty collaboration. The effort resulted in a dramatic…

Presents a curriculum model that emphasizes the development of transdisciplinary teaming skills. The model provides students in communication disorders, early childhood/special education, occupational therapy, and therapeutic recreation discipline-specific knowledge and skills as well as a core of cross disciplinary courses and experiences which…

This critical review of literature on mentoring encompasses print and online books and journals from the mid-nineties on. While by no means comprehensive, the literature surveyed was adequate to indicate how the field of mentoring in education stands today. The author's particular focus, in response to her needs and goals as an educator, was on…

The idea for the Intergroup Dialogue as Pedagogy Across the Curriculum (INTERACT) Pilot Project emerged, quite organically, from the cross-pollination of two major initiatives of the Office of Human Relations Programs (OHRP), the equity compliance and multicultural education arm of the Office of the President at the University of Maryland, College…

This article describes a collaboration between a university professor and a sixth-grade teacher who teamed to introduce algebra using a visual approach. The project began with a study of qualitative graphs, moved on to quantitative graphs, then introduced tables of values and finally concentrated on equations. (Contains 12 figures.)

This study presents the results of qualitative interviews of teachers who completed the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards (NBPTS) certification process. Teachers (N=25) were asked a series of questions about how the NBPTS process impacted their teaching. The findings revealed that the themes of reflection, assessment, and…

The interest to improve the quality of teaching in higher education has led to the involvement of a group of faculty members at the University of Granada Faculty of Education in an Action-Research (A-R) experience titled "Towards a model of collaborative lecture throughout the analysis of their educational tasks." This has been an…

School culture consists of "the beliefs, attitudes, and behaviors which characterize a school" (Phillips, 1996, p. 1). It is the shared experiences both in school and out of school (traditions and celebrations) that create a sense of community, family, and team membership. It affects everything that happens in a school, including student…

Some common complications that arise in collaborative research between school and university researchers, as well as some conditions for successful collaboration are described in this report. Difficulties possibly attributable to developmental levels of the researchers are discussed utilizing Kegan's (1982) theory of constructive developmentalism.…

This article will draw on an investigation of teachers' research in a small-scale project involving 19 schools in the North West region of England. The teachers engaged in the research were funded by a government initiative, the Best Practice Research Scholarships Programme, and were mentored and tutored by university staff. The sample is very…

This is a narrative report of a three-year professional development effort taking place within a professional development school (PDS). University professors collaborated with teachers in an urban junior high school to work on broadening their conceptions of literacy to enable student success. At the end of the project, it was clear that the…

Considered a successful university-operated, urban middle school serving an overwhelmingly African American student body, "Charter" Middle School was dechartered suddenly, then merged a year later with students from a neighborhood school to become "Choice" Middle School, a school of choice in the urban district. Using a situated learning framework…

This paper reviews the research literature on new teacher mentoring, focusing on issues of definition, why teachers quit, and the effects of mentoring on retention. Conclusions call for more scientific studies on the relationship between mentoring and retention, more research on the relation between mentoring and other educational outcomes, and a…

In this study, we followed three faculty members' experiences with designing and teaching online courses for the first time. In order to complete the activity, the faculty members had to work collaboratively with others across the university. Activity theory provided a framework within which to study faculty members' collaborative activities with…