Across the country, high schools have found that their ninth-grade students have the highest rates of truancy, discipline referrals, failures, and retentions. A school's worst data points are usually found among freshmen. For this reason, proactive schools seek strategies for transitioning freshmen into high school. An effective freshman…

This article discusses the successes and vulnerabilities associated with combining the pedagogical methods of Theater, Composition, and Community Literacy in the Composition classroom. It examines how the ideas of Augusto Boal's "Theatre of the Oppressed" and Paulo Freire's "Pedagogy of the Oppressed" can be combined to support…

In a school district context where a well-developed district-wide PDS partnership had been in operation for more than 15 years, a team of instructional coaches was formed of district teachers who left their classrooms for two to four years under the leadership of a curriculum coordinator. In this article, members of the coaching team offer…

The "Boston Teacher Leadership Certificate" program was designed in 2010 to build Boston's teachers to be stronger professional resources for one another, their schools, and district reform. The program's key strategy has been supporting experienced teacher leaders to design and facilitate graduate-level leadership development courses…

This article opens with a thought provoking question--When it comes to defining teacher leadership, how much do we limit ourselves by assuming that the way teachers work today must always be the way teachers work? The author points out that pioneering groups of public school teachers across the United States are advancing a new definition of…

Educationalists are currently engaging with Jacques Ranciere's thought on emancipation and equality. The focus of this paper is on what initiates the process that starts emancipation. With reference to teachers the question is: how do teachers become emancipated? This paper discusses how the teacher's life is made "sensible" and how sense is…

The role of a teacher as an action researcher in Croatia is still insufficiently appreciated and promoted in initial teachers' training, school students learning and in the employed teachers' professional post-qualification development. In this country, teachers are most frequently perceived as mediators or technicians whose task is to prepare and…

Teacher leadership is about empowering teachers to take a more active role in school improvement. Current pathways to teacher leadership, namely the Teacher Leader Master (TLM) degree program and teacher-led professional development, mainly target in-service teachers. Less attention has been paid to teacher leadership training in current teacher…

To better prepare themselves for authentic teaching situations, pre- and in-service teachers should become familiarized with the application of curriculum-development theory in their training programs. The authors will detail how they have become more prepared to face the challenges of course development by outlining their own experience designing…

Although Garth Boomer spoke of "thresholds of explicitness" (1988, p. 169) beyond which teachers would not venture in the openness of their curriculum design or indeed the nature of the system in which they operate, Stephen Wallis writes in this article that he does believe in student-centred learning and encouraging students to be…

With contributions from leading scholars all around the world, this volume underlines the ever-pressing need for new language in education policies to include all learners' voices in the multilingual classroom and to empower teachers to develop responsive and transformative pedagogies. Using testimonies, narratives and examples from different…

"It's always been a promising time for teacher leadership. It's just never been a successful time," writes noted educator Roland Barth. Why? Barth points to five obstacles: administrator resistance, the taboo in teaching against elevating oneself higher than one's peers, the fact that teachers' plates are full, the…

Drawing on the author's experience as both a graduate student and ESL practitioner, this article explores the process of taking on a voice of authority within a new discourse. The author reflects on her own struggles with authorship in the professional discourse community of TESOL, and she uses these experiences to illuminate the struggles of her…

Although best practices in student instruction and learning have evolved dramatically over the past couple of decades, new approaches to educator professional development have lagged behind considerably. The traditional whole group, one-size-fits-all strategy universally recognized as ineffective for teaching students, has too-long remained the…

This report summarizes district-level results of the 2015 Teaching, Empowering, Leading, and Learning (TELL) AISD Survey. A separate one-page research brief also was published. [For the brief, see ED626501.]