Realizing the potential of online or virtual communities to facilitate teacher professional development requires educators to change their current perceptions of professional development. This calls for educators to develop new images of ongoing opportunities for professional development, based on their needs within an online community of learners…

One of the central concerns of English as a Second Language (ESL) education within many English-speaking countries has been the relationship between content and language teaching. In Victoria, a state of Australia, the educational policy of mainstreaming ESL is presented as a means of catering to the language learning needs of ESL students within…

Good mentoring is not an easy process. From the research literature on mentoring, people know that there are critical factors that affect the mentoring relationship and process: the selection of mentors, whether or not mentors and proteges are assigned, how formal or informal the relationship is, how mentors might or might not be rewarded for…

Over a two-year period, the teachers at John Adams Middle School wrote and administered eight common assessments across content areas and met to discuss the results of each. By linking standards, assessments, and instruction, teachers were able to identify areas of need for specific students and address those needs. Educators across the country…

In 2004, five North Carolina school districts combined forces with five corporate foundations to leverage their collective wisdom and develop regional strategies for school improvement. The result was the High Five Regional Partnership for High School Excellence, a corporate-public sector effort that had the common goal of improving graduation…

This study describes the influences that one professional learning community had on teacher resilience, teacher retention, and school reform initiatives. Teachers at a low performing, urban middle school in the Southeastern United States implemented professional learning communities as a reform initiative to assist with staff development. This…

A collaborative approach was developed to support the professional development of teacher candidates, collaborating teachers (CTs) and teacher educators in learning to use technology for professional and pedagogical uses. Collaboration with K-5 teachers was undertaken to build the teachers' capacities to use technology in meaningful ways in their…

This study reports on collaboration between second language (L2) instructors of English and Japanese. Learners and speakers of each language were brought together on a regular basis to serve as models, partners, group members, and supportive peers to assist each other's language learning efforts. ANOVA analyses were used to contrast students in…

During Winter/Spring of 2004, Danielle Cione, a 5th grade classroom teacher at New York City's PS 199, and Tanya Witek, a Teaching Artist for the New York Philharmonic School Partnership Program, planned and implemented a series of lessons exploring the relationship of the Writer's Workshop as taught in the schools and the process used by…

This article presents eight ways a school librarian can help promote literacy and life-long learning: (1) Offer books that teenagers want to read; (2) Promote reading for pleasure; (3) Recommend related reading to teachers in many subject areas; (4) Collaborate with teachers to incorporate literature and technology into the curriculum; (5) Offer…

Student suicides and attempted suicides are on the rise globally, and the numbers continue to climb steeply in most Westernized countries. School personnel remain untrained and uninformed in the area of suicide; few teachers or administrators can accurately identify the characteristics of suicidal behavior and fewer still have any knowledge of…

The article reports work over one year by three teachers from the Milton Keynes Primary Schools Learning Network. Their collaborative classroom-focused action research investigated the limits and possibilities of pupils' and teachers' learning through self-evaluation. In phase one the teacher researchers used questionnaires, interviews and…

Background/context: Professional development is an important element of professional practice and teachers are expected to engage in activities that not only improve practice but also have a positive impact on pupil learning. Physical educators worldwide have acknowledged the need to improve the continuing education of teachers and have called…

In education, mentoring is typically understood as a one-on-one relationship between a novice teacher and a more experienced, competent colleague. Through the mentoring relationship, the veteran teacher guides the new teacher into the profession. In this article, the author supports an alternative conception of mentoring by describing how a group…

The author discusses teaching early child mathematics in an environment of unique challenge in a remote region of Western Australia. The challenges include: (1) a high proportion of transient students; (2) a student population that is forty percent aboriginal, many for whom English is a second language; (3) students who consistently perform below…