Borrowing her title from Parker Palmer's "Courage to Teach", Kathy Egawa revisits her own professional learning journey and contrasts traditional, one-size-fits-all professional development with her own more meaningful learning from teaching. Her stories and research from the field focus on 1) learning from students, 2) learning among colleagues,…

This qualitative action research study examined teachers' perceptions of leadership, research-based practices, and experience. I investigated how these three factors influenced the culture and change process at one suburban high school in order to better understand the context and to ultimately use the knowledge gained to improve the culture…

Prevalent models of secondary education in the United States have tended to privilege the acquisition of knowledge of scientific disciplines that is often peripheral to the experiences of students. My Advanced Placement Government classes were no different, and this caused me to wonder whether my classes were meeting the often-stated goal of the…

Can mentoring and coaching really improve professional practice? How can research and inquiry improve mentoring and coaching practice? "Mentoring and Coaching in Schools" explores the ways in which mentoring and coaching can be used as a dynamic collaborative process for effective professional learning. It demonstrates how the use of practitioner…

Either action research by teachers uses the approach as a methodology to examine pedagogical change in a single intervention or it is used as means of understanding a journey of change. In contrast, this paper examines the significant impact of using action research in a second cycle of learning in the same context and with the same participants.…

This phenomenological study examined the impact of Research Experiences for Teachers (RET) teacher-developed curriculum on teaching styles and strategies at two RET sites with common Legacy Cycle training. The study was conducted to assess and document program-specific and National Science Foundation (NSF) goals related to classroom practices and…

In her new book, Valerie Kinloch, award-winning author of "Harlem on Our Minds", sheds light on the ways urban youth engage in "meaning-making" experiences as a way to assert critical, creative, and highly sophisticated perspectives on teaching, learning, and survival. Kinloch rejects deficit models that have traditionally…

There are still many South African teachers who are challenged by the implementation of the relatively new system of education. They have to explore a variety of strategies as they try to transform their pedagogy to enhance learning in their classrooms. This post-apartheid system also challenges educators to be transformative individuals who…

The paper draws initially on theoretical literature describing schools and universities as, necessarily, dialogic learning communities, which is then applied to an investigation into the use of peer review in teacher education in an Australian university. The empirical research described was completed with pre-service teachers of religious…

This article, written as a reflexive story, describes my journey as a practitioner researcher investigating the implementation of a study-group format in place of a formal meeting arrangement for the teaching team I lead. The inquiry has been initiated to explore the intervention as a way to promote teacher morale. The research site is a large…

In this paper I report the insights of my personal research journal as part of a collaborative action research project I facilitated in a secondary school where I teach English as a foreign language. I kept a journal so as to offer the natural history of my research towards my doctoral degree. In this project I worked together with four…

The aim of this study is to analyze the action research undertaken by Khan as a teacher researcher in a private school as part of the degree requirement of his M.Ed. program in Teacher Education at the Aga Khan University, Institute for Educational Development. The purpose of this analysis undertaken by the first author and supervisor of the study…

This paper is based on an online graduate program for middle school science and mathematics teachers in Texas titled Integration of Science, Mathematics and Reflective Teaching (iSMART). Launching the program for its first cohort in fall 2010, the authors attempted to answer the following two questions in this paper: (a) How do the members of the…

In this powerful collection of personal accounts, successful and respected teachers from across the country reveal how recent education policies have played out in their schools and classrooms in negative and counterproductive ways, and offer teacher-led alternatives for providing equitable, engaging, and empowering education. Framed by critical…

The purpose of this article is to present the design and findings of a collaborative action research study that involved five secondary science teachers as action researchers and me, as facilitator, collectively articulating the teachers' changing teaching roles when the teachers taught with computer technology. Data included interviews,…