There are challenges in doing any type of collaborative research. In fact, the very "culture of higher education" is one where status comes from individual accomplishments rather than from group success. This high value placed on individual achievement often leads to fostering a work environment where competition is fierce. This leads to questions…

Filling the Gap with Innovations is a study of a higher education professional development model used to infuse a teacher education program with technology innovations in order to address curriculum gaps. Professional educators at the university level are not traditionally collaborative. Yet, when an assessment of program alignment to state…

A considerable amount of current research on teaching and teacher education focuses on teacher collaboration. Teacher collaboration is presumed to be a powerful learning environment for teachers' professional development. However, empirical research about how teachers actually learn in collaborative settings is lacking. In this study, learning…

Pedagogical content knowledge (PCK) is essential to career development for teachers. Teachers can develop their own PCK by research-based activities such as action research and lesson study, with a particular emphasis on the employment of classroom practice, information technology, and collaborative learning. However, in recent studies, most of…

This article reports on the results of a mixed method case study investigating the relationship between professional learning community (PLC) activities and teacher improvement in a first-year middle school. Data were collected from core academic sixth, seventh, and eighth grade teachers using a professional development survey, teacher interviews,…

The purpose of this guide is to help experienced professional developers and others organize and conduct professional development that trains facilitators of National Center for the Study of Adult Learning and Literacy (NCSALL) study circles. Promoters of the study circle facilitators training should be experienced trainers. This guide includes…

This article describes an analytic approach for situating teachers' instructional practices within the institutional settings of the schools and school districts in which they work. The approach treats instructional leadership and teaching as distributed activities and involves first delineating the communities of practice within a school or…

Facilitating schools to develop more collaborative cultures is seen as one of the major challenges in promoting teachers' continuing professional development. This article recounts how a fifteen-month project designed to promote greater collegial learning and professional development emerged and developed within one school. Evidence suggests that…

The purpose of this article is to examine the teacher research movement from the perspective of three generations of teacher researchers within the context of a unique collaborative science teacher action research group. The question that guided the study was the following: In what ways do three generations of science teachers perceive their…

The study that we report in this paper, named as learning study, is a hybrid between a design experiment as characterized by Brown and Collins, and a Japanese lesson study as characterized by Yoshida, and Stigler and Hiebert. This paper aims at tracing the development of the learning study and examining its impact on teacher professional learning,…

This article considers teaching and learning as a collaborative enterprise in the workplace. The empirical data have been extracted from a field study among apprentices engaged in electromechanical vocational training and education in a major Danish industrial company. Typically, studies of apprenticeship learning do not view aspects of teaching…

After many years of hearing teachers express surprise at their students' performance in arts classes, ArtsConnection set out to create a process that would help define and focus attention on artistic abilities and characteristics and bring further value and legitimacy to artists' views of children. The result is the Talent Assessment Process in…

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…

Although teacher learning and collaboration are repeatedly linked to school improvement, surprisingly little is known about the facet of collaboration involving the dissemination or sharing of teacher knowledge; that is, what teachers share, why and with whom they share it, or how and when they share what they have learned. This article describes…

Practitioner research is a topic of growing interest and scholarly writing in the field of education in general and adult education in particular. This article describes a particular form of practitioner research that rests on a participatory worldview and draws heavily from theory and practice in adult learning and action research.…