The purpose of the current study was to examine the perceptions of teachers in different professional development periods regarding their experience of traditional activities for continuing professional development (CPD). The participants were 45 teachers from three professional life periods on the basis of teaching experience. Teachers'…

Following educational reform in Israel, teacher-leaders create and lead professional development communities (PDCs), which are professional learning communities with a focus on in-service professional development and/or improving pedagogical effectiveness. Interviews with 30 teacher-leaders and all four district-level program coordinators revealed…

A growing number of studies have suggested that teachers' personal competencies, and more specifically Emotional Intelligence (EI), are particularly important for teacher effectiveness. Recently, there has also been a growing recognition of the importance of social-emotional competencies to students' learning and academic achievement. However,…

This paper shows some mechanisms as well as the paralysing implications of the perpetrator-victim positioning in the context of inservice education with Jewish- and Palestinian-Israeli teachers who teach in Palestinian-Jewish integrated schools. It examines how these teachers remain rooted in the hegemonic historical narratives of their own…

This study is an attempt to gain new insight, on behalf of science teachers, into the integration of metacognition (MC) into science education. Participants were 44 elementary school science teachers attending an in-service teacher-training (INST) program. Data collection was carried out by several data sources: recordings of all verbal…

The present paper deals with Jewish and Palestinian teachers who work in an integrated school in Israel, and shows the challenges and possibilities from examining these teachers' powerful historical narratives in the context of in-service training sessions. It is shown how these teachers essentially remain firmly rooted in the hegemonic historical…

Since biology is one of the most dynamic research fields within the natural sciences, the gap between the accumulated knowledge in biology and the knowledge that is taught in schools, increases rapidly with time. Our long-term objective is to develop means to bridge between the dynamics of biological discoveries and the biology teachers and…

This volume contains papers submitted to the 11th Annual International Conference of the Bulgarian Comparative Education Society (BCES), held in Plovdiv, Bulgaria, 14-17 May 2013, and papers submitted to the 1st International Distance Partner Conference, organized by the International Research Centre "Scientific Cooperation,"…