Truly impacting teacher practices is a challenge for educational professional development (PD) providers. Typically, little attention is paid to the factors within the environment to which the educators return and how those factors will impact participants' ability to integrate what they have learned into their teaching practices. Even for…

Despite their experience as writing center directors (WCDs) and their knowledge of the literature on writing center administration, the authors wondered why their interactions with upper level administrators (ULAs) so often left them feeling angered or mystified. The all-too-clear evidence of their ineffectual responses to their seemingly…

The incorporation of various textual resources into scientific inquiry is important for establishing background knowledge. Many of these resources are now presented in hypertext or hypermedia environments, which require students to comprehend and actively integrate information from multiple sources. Further, numerous practices employed by readers…

Much effort over many years has been devoted to the reform of the teaching of physics. This has led to many new and imaginative approaches in the content and delivery of material. Great strides have been made in the delivery, and the content has been continually supplemented. However, attempts to modernize the basic structure of the presentation…

The rise of the research intensive university has led some critics to argue that teaching has been discounted in favour of research, and thus the academy has "failed...their undergraduate populations" (Boyer Commission, 1998, p .5). This paper examines instructor perceptions of inquiry at an institution with a significant history of…

In order to deliver life-long learning for teachers, practitioner-based enquiry learning is being promoted by teacher education institutions on the basis that this form of learning gives teachers the ability to understand factors affecting learning within their own classrooms by systematic investigations of issues and the construction of an…

Spoken Word, presented here, is an embodiment of critical theory, where discourse centered on the intersections of race, class, identity, lived experiences, and critical consciousness are named, analyzed, and interpreted in critical performance narratives. Merging the social sciences and the humanities--blending narrative, radical performance…

Inquiry-based instruction requires a deep, conceptual understanding of the process of science combined with a sophisticated knowledge of teaching and learning. This study examines the changes in classroom instructional practices and corresponding changes to knowledge and beliefs about inquiry instruction for eight high school chemistry teachers.…

High school chemistry teachers' experiences learning science through lectures and verification labs make it difficult for them to transition to inquiry-based approaches called for in the U.S. National Science Education Standards. Unfortunately, widely implemented approaches to teacher professional development (PD) aimed at reform, such as…

The use of Web 2.0 communication practices in assessment may offer a new approach to assessment "as" learning, a goal for assessment that is more highly valued than assessment "of" and even "for" learning in the literature. This paper describes a case study of a wiki-writing assignment that aimed to achieve this goal. The stakes were high, in that…

This article examines the pedagogical practices of two science inquiry teachers and their students using a Web-based system called Web of Inquiry (WOI). There is a need to build a collective repertoire of pedagogical practices that can assist elementary and middle school teachers as they support students to develop a complex model of inquiry based…

This paper presents a critical analysis of the representation of physical education (PE) in the 1992 Senate inquiry into "Physical and Sport Education" in Australia. Analysis focuses specifically upon how and why a new professional discourse, fundamental motor skills (FMS), gained a privileged position in the inquiry, the inquiry report…

Educational disparities are frequently framed in racial comparisons that are based on data generated by sorting and counting racial subgroups. Our reliance on these data, and the sorting and counting mechanisms entailed therein, is fundamental to debates about racial inequalities. What is largely ignored in achievement gap discourse is how racial…

Prospective teachers are often found to have difficulty focusing their attention on students in sustained and constructive ways. Instead, in what is sometimes understood as a developmental matter, beginners may seem highly concerned with their own feelings and needs. This article offers a contrary finding. It examines two cases of prospective…

In this paper, we examined data collected as part of a 5-year project designed to foster reform-based urban science teaching through teachers' communities of inquiry. Drawing upon a distributed leadership framework, we analyzed teacher "talk" during professional learning community (PLC) meetings. This analysis yielded five elements:…