This study examined social structures that complicate teacher professional development within the context of university and school partnerships in a Western state. Semi-structured interview with participants was the primary data source for conducting an activity systems analysis comparing teacher professional development activities with school…

Many universities recognize urgent environmental dilemmas and embrace efforts to move campus operations and university culture toward sustainability. However, the broader academic mission across departments and programs is often slower to connect with sustainability efforts. The Piedmont Project at Emory University offers one model of a faculty…

This article describes our experiences as six faculty members at a mid-sized state college whose collaboration grew into a substantive endeavor to improve writing pedagogy and practice across our disciplines of English, Educational Studies, Instructional Technology, Educational Psychology and Counseling. Within our practice, we approach writing in…

Peer coaching, or peer assisting, was established in 1970s by Joyce and Showers. Initially used in teachers' professional development, it refers to a process that two or more teacher peers evaluate current practice mutually; expand skills, extract and build new skills; share ideas, and review & solve problems of classroom teaching in a way of…

Recently, the Modern Language Association (MLA) called for a major reorganization of undergraduate academic programs and even the structure of foreign-language departments. Typically, the initial two years of language instruction are taught by non-tenure-track instructors with little or no voice in the department. Faculty members mainly teach the…

As we engage our students in social studies topics--whether at the college level or the secondary level--we are charged with promoting habits of mind and thought that produce our country's citizens. If we are doing our jobs, we are insistent about finding ways to connect the democracy in our classrooms with the democracy in our culture, and thus…

The purposes of this study are to discuss the visionary instructional planning through the social process as school wide faculty collaboration and prepare teachers through their identity connections of graduate reading application. The discussion exemplifies four collaborative instructional teams from Honduras Elementary School, Houma, Louisiana,…

The new paradigm of language education envisages that teachers become intercultural mediators. However, there is no agreement about implementing the new paradigm in school practice and language teacher education. The author believes that the intercultural dimension of language education is strongly linked to integrating intercultural learning in…

Training legal English specialists is one area in which cooperation between discipline and language specialists is particularly valuable. Seven short excerpts from a short training course run jointly by teachers of English for legal purposes and legal specialists are presented and analysed to illustrate the contribution an ESP oriented approach,…

Technology education teachers today have at their disposal the skills, opportunity, experience, ingenuity, expertise, equipment, and environment to greatly improve students' ability to learn and apply the knowledge they have gained in their academic programs. When a technology education teacher joins forces with an academic core teacher, the…

In the recent years, teacher quality has become a top priority of our national education policy. There is empirical evidence that suggests that teacher inputs have impact on student outcomes. It is also believed that teacher dispositions are as crucial for student achievement as a teacher's pedagogical and content knowledge/skills. The National…

The author discusses mentoring and training strategies that enhance adjunct faculty members' teaching effectiveness in undergraduate science laboratories and foster a sense of common enterprise within the institutional environment. These strategies include the preparation of an "Adjunct Faculty Handbook", mentoring and peer-support programs, and…

What elements are critical in fostering the engagement of two individuals in a mentoring relationship? Based on this phenomenological research on the mentoring experiences of women faculty, a feeling of connection emerged as an essential attribute of these relationships. The findings suggest that HRD professionals should be engaged in providing…

There are many ways to improve the quality of education, but it is believed that the scholarship of teaching and learning holds special promise. The scholarship of teaching and learning invites faculty from all disciplines and fields to identify and explore interesting questions in their own teaching--and, especially, in their students'…

This article recounts how a communications and an engineering department instituted a team-teaching venture to supplement engineering students' communication skills in a discipline-specific context.