In this chapter, we provide a snapshot of critical theories with salience for adult education to illuminate their enduring efficacy within the discipline, including critical feminism, queer theory, and race-based critical theories. Critical theories seek to make individual change while dismantling the structures that suppress freedom and…

Researchers have concluded that policy implementation is a process of mutual adaptation between policies and implementers. Our study draws attention to that relationship, especially with respect to policies that challenge assumptions about sex, gender, and sexuality. We focus on how six administrators in one United States school district…

This workbook guides a team in reviewing, revising, or replacing an existing professional learning system. The process outlined and the tools included support the team in conducting all aspects of its work, usually done over several months, with continuous progress monitoring and input from research, experts, and constituents. The workbook is…

This article analyses key events in the history of adult and community education in Aotearoa New Zealand. It draws on historical sources to examine the role of grassroots community activism and local and national networking in upholding a broad vision of adult and community-based education, in the face of a hostile policy climate. The authors…

Professional development opportunities are common for teachers and principals who operate on the front lines of education. But they are rarer for public education's top leaders--state chiefs, superintendents, board members and others--who are further from classrooms but whose policies and practices nonetheless profoundly affect student…

"Webster needs an extreme makeover," students told Principal Joan Brixey upon her arrival at Daniel Webster Middle School in Waukegan, Illinois, three short years ago. The message came in a student-produced video that highlighted things that needed repair at Webster. Brixey was already a firm believer in the proposition that students…

The emerging field of educational visioning is full of challenges and phenomena worthy of careful analysis and documentation. A relatively neglected phenomenon is the learning curve of the leaders (often lay leaders) involved in the visioning process. This article documents a range of experiences of the author serving as a vision coach to five…

Historically grounded in a tradition of meeting local skills needs and training the children of the poor, vocational education and training (VET) in schools continues to struggle in terms of esteem and parity of status. Associated in the literature with the training of a reliable and compliant class of workers, it has also been tainted by its…

As the industrialised world shifted to an interdependent and global society, formal schooling was quickly recognised as a major factor in achieving a knowledge society of lifelong learners capable of transforming and revitalising organisations. Teachers were encouraged to engage in learning together to improve teaching and, by extension, improve…

The general assumption that once the hardware is introduced in schools, ICT integration will automatically follow is not necessarily true. Teachers need to be supported and factors responsible for teachers' failure to integrate ICT into the classrooms identified and rectified. The paper proposes an online model based on the Improvement Quality…

Performance feedback has been described as a necessary component of consultation. Although feedback has been used to improve academic performance of individual students, less research has examined the effects on classroom academic engagement when implementation of classroom management variables is the source of feedback. Using a multiple-baseline…

When the author and her colleagues work on goal setting at Greenfield Center School (GCS), they have a practice of showing what the relationships, interaction, teaching practices, and evidence of learning look and sound like. Making theory more concrete helps them all to envision the work ahead. In 2006, a group of elementary level Essential…

While transfer of information to practice is a goal of professional development programs for educators, the gap between learning of new information and application to practice continues to be problematic. Synthesizing theoretical viewpoints of innovation adoption and diffusion theory, normative re-education strategies, self-efficacy theory and…