As anyone would readily agree, no child should be trapped in a persistently failing school. When the author was appointed New Mexico's secretary of education in 2011, she committed to never settle for failure and never stop pursuing equity and opportunity for all students. Many of New Mexico's students live in poverty or are students of color and…

Peer mentoring and participating in professional development communities (PDCs) have been documented as supporting individuals through the transition into the teacher educator profession. However, Gallagher, Griffin, Parker, Kitchen, and Figg (2011) suggested future researchers examine the lasting impact of participating in PDCs. The purpose of…

The Teacher Academy in the Natural Sciences (TANS) provided middle school (U.S. Grades 6-8) teachers (N = 81) with intensive professional development (PD) in chemistry, geosciences, and physics, with teachers enrolled in one scientific discipline per year. Because some teachers were retained and rotated into different disciplines, the TANS program…

For many years a leading approach to teaching at-risk students and reducing school dropout has been the use of alternative schools. There are unique challenges to providing educational services in alternative schools and teachers in those schools need specialized knowledge and skills to address these challenges. The same can be inferred for…

This commentary is a response to Larsen and Harrington's article titled "Developing a Learning Progression for Place" (2018). Within the author focuses on the development of learning progressions in geography and future research directions. [For "Developing a Learning Progression for Place" by Thomas B. Larsen and John A.…

The purpose of this short article is to offer a critical perspective on Larsen and Harrington's ambitious and stimulating review article. It does so by drawing a distinction between teaching and learning and discussing how progression metaphors for describing the latter can distort the moral purpose of the former. My response to the provocation…

Deficits in safety skills and communication deficits place individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) at an increased risk of danger. We used a multiple-probe across-participants design to evaluate the effects of video modeling and programming common stimuli to teach low- and high-tech help-seeking responses to children with ASD when lost.…

This article explores the role of a teaching portfolio in supporting the transition from teacher to teacher educator. It uses aspects of self-study to catalogue the challenges and successes during this transition. Despite well-documented acknowledgement of the differing demands of teaching when compared to teaching how to teach, little is written…

This contribution is based on an analysis of recent changes in doctoral education that can be observed in Europe and China. It traces the policies having led to these changes and discusses related policy transfer. The contribution is divided into five parts. It begins by sketching recent changes in doctoral education in the framework of the…

Principal preparation and training is generally viewed as an important contributor to school and system improvement. While the international evidence based on leadership and leadership development is extensive, contemporary accounts of principal preparation in a number of Asian countries are not widespread. This article outlines the findings from…

Purpose: Starting Thinking Training at an early age is important. However, few studies were found regarding Thinking Training programs for pre-school children and the contributions of these programs to children's social problem-solving. In this context, the TMPT Program was developed for pre-school children and the effect of the program on 5-6…

Background: Despite widespread use of digital toys, research evidence of how a digital toy's features affect children's development and the nature of parent-child interactions during play is limited. Objective: The present study aimed to examine how mother-child dyads experience a traditional stuffed toy and an animated digital toy by comparing…

While it is well understood there is an urgent need to address global environmental problems, there is less understanding around how these problems can be addressed. At each level of government, policy is initiated as a response to a perceived problem. However, research has shown governmental policies are overly generalised which creates a…

Building on the various works of theorists pertaining to curriculum negotiation, the Negotiated Integrated Curriculum (NIC) initiative detailed in this article attempts to redress the imbalance within curricular decision-making whereby student voice and learner agency is largely absent. The NIC initiative enquires into students' concerns about…

How people see the world, even how they research it, is influenced by beliefs. Some beliefs are conscious and the result of research, or at least amenable to research. Others are largely invisible. They may feel like "common knowledge" (though myth, not knowledge), unrecognized premises that are part of the surrounding culture. As we…