This article outlines the methodology and findings from an interpretive collective case study exploring the professional learning of three elementary music teachers. Participants were purposefully selected based on their differing career stages, background, and teaching situations, and each participant was interviewed five or six times over the…

Many teachers today struggle to meet the differentiated needs in their classrooms. Mentorship programs are often available to teachers in the first five years of teaching, but after the initial induction process there is little support for teachers. In the past, when teachers were identified as struggling in the classroom, they were evaluated…

The ability to mentally rotate objects in space has been singled out by cognitive scientists as a central metric of spatial reasoning (see Jansen, Schmelter, Quaiser-Pohl, Neuburger, & Heil, 2013; Shepard & Metzler, 1971 for example). However, this is a particularly undeveloped area of current mathematics curricula, especially in North…

This case study research reports on elementary (grade 8) and secondary school (grade 9) teachers' participation in job-embedded, professional learning and engagement in collaborative inquiry. Teachers constructed an inquiry-oriented media literacy unit following the collaborative inquiry model. The current study sought to investigate how…

Based on a qualitative case study that examined elementary teachers' understandings of a professional development policy, we question the conceptual disconnection between professional learning and professional practices in some conceptualizations of professional learning communities. We analyse the research data using Actor-Network Theory and…

Math is often taught poorly emphasizing rote, procedural methods rather than creativity and problem solving. Alberta Education developed a new mathematics curriculum to transform mathematics teaching to inquiry driven methods. This revised curriculum provides a new vision for mathematics and creates opportunities and requirements for professional…

This article reports comprehensive findings from a national study of the teaching and assessment of writing in classrooms across ten Canadian provinces and two of three territories. Through interviews with 216 grade 4-8 teachers and observations and interviews in 22 classrooms (1 to 3 classrooms in each province), we gathered information about…

This article addresses a gap in the literature by developing a theory that bridges lesson study and self-efficacy. Since self-efficacy has been linked to student achievement, the theory is important as an explanatory mechanism linking lesson study to student achievement. The theory was developed using grounded theory based on primary source data…

Teachers' professional identities are associated with an ongoing commitment to professional development and the explicit aim of improving practice in order to increase student learning. During the last century, professional development initiatives took many forms, including laboratory schools, lesson study, video clubs, and demonstration…

This case study traces the development of one teacher as she participated in Teachers As Artist, a four-year professional development program for teachers. I have used transformation theory, an articulation of the complex processes involved in life-altering adult learning, to examine her development from early dispirited participation in the arts…