Empirical evidence supports the notion of special education teachers receiving limited pre-service training in augmentative and alternative communication (AAC). This lack of training is not only evident in the United States but in other countries such as United Kingdom, India, and Israel. Yet the teaching demands for the use of AAC are increasing…

Voices of practitioners are often missing in research studies. This project focused on examining general education teachers' stories as they relate to implementation of Universal Design for Learning (UDL) framework and inclusion of students with moderate to severe intellectual disability. Seven general education teachers from Canada and the United…

Recent research suggests that personal and institutional constraints often limit the degree to which professional development impacts teaching practice. Darling-Hammond suggests that one of those constraints is time in schools for collaborative planning. She cites high performing schools in Europe and Asia that have three to four times more…

This paper reports on a research study of 28 literacy teacher educators (LTE) in four countries: Canada, the USA, England and Australia. It identifies three main forms of professional development: informal, formal and communities of practice and four spheres of knowledge: research; pedagogy of higher education; literacy and literacy teaching; and…

Successful education systems are those that promote leadership at all levels, thereby encouraging teachers and principals, regardless of the formal positions they occupy, to lead innovation in the classroom, the school and the system as a whole. This report summarises evidence from the OECD Teaching and Learning International Survey and the OECD…

This study reports how teachers at one suburban elementary school in the United States launched, organized, and structured lesson study, as well as how participants interpreted and perceived the lesson study experience. Additionally, it examines how lesson study supports teachers' professional learning and the development of collaborative teacher…

Problem-solving teams address student difficulties. Teams comprised of teachers, specialists, and administrators identify the student problem, develop individualized interventions, and assess student change. Teacher experiences of teams are understudied. In a prospective, mixed-method study conducted in the United States, 34 teachers were followed…

While study abroad is increasingly popular among students in the United States (IIE 2007), tenure track faculty involvement with these programs has not kept up with demand. University and college-run programs often struggle to find sufficient numbers of tenure track faculty, especially junior faculty, to staff their programs. While older faculty…

The 21 urban research universities that are members of the Great Cities' Universities (GCU) annually enroll approximately 20 percent of the students in the United States who are preparing to teach in K12 urban schools. This study examined the experiences of GCU-sponsored, school-university teacher preparation partnerships in Atlanta, Houston,…

School culture consists of "the beliefs, attitudes, and behaviors which characterize a school" (Phillips, 1996, p. 1). It is the shared experiences both in school and out of school (traditions and celebrations) that create a sense of community, family, and team membership. It affects everything that happens in a school, including student…

The purpose of this study was to investigate the perceptions of urban students regarding their teachers who were of different races/ethnicities. The participants in this study were twelve students (African-American, Caucasian, and Bi-Racial) in an urban elementary school. The twelve students were in a special education self-contained classroom and…