The importance of continuing professional development (CPD) is increasingly recognised as an important contributor to school improvement. Successful CPD involves gaining the commitment of teachers to the process, and to sustaining and supporting their involvement in activities that are beneficial to both their professional growth and the…

Most training and educational professionals have focused their efforts on inculcating learning within individuals rather than within organizations. This is understandable, writes Forman, because so much needs to be accomplished to improve the efficacy of schools and corporate training programs. The notion of organizational learning has been…

Action research is defined as systematic classroom-based inquiry to solve teacher-perceived problems. It has been a component of education, particularly professional staff development, for the past century under several names although geography educators in the United States have rarely used it for this, or any other, purpose. This paper reviews…

By looking at teacher collaborative structures in an urban public elementary school, this article demonstrates how, in the face of top-down school decisions under the pressures of high-stakes testing and assessment-driven curriculum, teachers can find the power and freedom for creative and effective pedagogy to flourish. We describe how teachers…

During the last two decades teachers in many countries have found themselves facing new demands and changes. In his "intensification thesis" Apple made a powerful attempt to conceptualize and explain these changes: the growing economic and management oriented perspective on education leads to intensification of teachers' work, implying deskilling…

In-service teacher education in China has traditionally been mainly lecture-centred, theory-orientated, and experience-led. For various contemporary reasons such an approach may not be effective since it is unlikely to provide a context in which teachers are able to put educational theories into practice. "Action Education", a…

This study examined to what degree the existing curricula, teaching practices, and assessments in 15 elementary physical education programs were aligned with the National Standards for Physical Education (NASPE, 1995) in the USA. Fifteen elementary physical education teachers voluntarily participated in this study. Data were gathered through…

The overall aim of this paper is to give an account of action learning in practice. It demonstrates the potential strengths and weaknesses of action learning. The information given is derived from five years in an action learning set. Significant events from within and without the action learning set will be explored using the themes clarifying;…

Background: It is widely claimed that critical reflection upon experience is a valuable process in which all teachers should engage in order to improve their professional practice. Assumptions are made about the benefits of reflection both for the teacher as person and professional; however, there is a lack of in-depth research on the reflective…

This article explores the question of how engaging in teacher inquiry within the context of a school-university partnership influences teachers' use of technology to enhance student learning. While striving to meet the National Educational Technology Standards (NETS) and performance indicators for teachers (Information Society for Technology in…

This article examines the disposition toward critical thinking of post-baccalaureate initial certification students at a Texas institution of higher education using the California Critical Thinking Disposition Inventory. The inventory characterizes seven subscales of critical thinking disposition and an eighth combined score for overall critical…

Changes in the requirements for training primary school teachers in England over the past 12 years have increasingly demanded more involvement from the schools themselves. University departments and schools have developed partnerships to implement these changes and teachers are increasingly finding themselves taking a key role in the training of…

The central theme of this article is that teachers' professional development in England is not being taken as seriously as it needs to be. With reference to the induction of newly-qualified teachers and the early professional development pilot schemes, it draws on data from several related pieces of research, to argue that cases of…

Many more teachers begin studying for masters' level awards than complete them. This situation is a concern to participants, providers and funders of courses. The research project reported here explores teachers' perceptions of factors affecting their success in completing assessed work. Questionnaire and interview responses from 46 students in…

The purpose of this study was to understand factors that make teacher professional development successful and what success might mean in terms of teachers' instructional practices and feelings about change. Specifically, this study focused on the impact of instructional resources on the large-scale curricular reform of 30 urban physical education…