In this article, the role that formal leaders play in helping distributed leadership take root and flourish in schools is explored. The focus of the study is an urban middle school, one of six cases in a larger three-year investigation of distributed leadership in two mid-Atlantic states. Using interview and document-based data, the authors…

In this article we investigate educational leadership as a site of practice, utilising the notion of "practice architectures" as our lens. The latter shifts Etienne Wenger's more individualising notion of 'learning architectures' to a broader study of the systems and organisations that prefigure educational practices and potentially,…

Background: Professional commitment from teachers requires more than contractual compliance as personal and professional values are integral to teaching practice. Secondary school teachers are expected to act as role models and demonstrate positive attributes and attitudes in an evolving educational context. Little is known about how they…

This article examines and critiques the leadership capacity of department leaders in a high school and attempts to gain a deeper understanding of how department leaders perceive their role as teacher leaders, making a distinction between what an individual department leader does in his or her position and teacher leadership as a form of continuous…

Purpose: The purpose of this study is to examine the meaning of teacher leadership from teachers' perspectives. The authors examine teachers' practice of and talk about legitimate sources of power and influence in the context of an urban high school reform. Design: This is an interpretive study of teacher leadership situated in one small high…

This study investigates why teachers, identified by their school principal as being leaders or having leadership potential, chose not to become school principals. At a time in which the literature is reporting a shortage of qualified applicants for school administrative positions the identified reasons most cited by teacher leaders include…

Most work on professional learning opportunities in education focuses on classroom teachers and school principals. In this paper the authors take a broader look at school leaders' opportunities to learn from a distributed perspective. Using one mid-sized urban school district as their case, they examine the opportunities to learn (OTL) of school…

This report concludes that for the U.S. to prosper and compete in the 21st century, the education system will need to change its goals and practices so all students may succeed. That is, as information has become ubiquitous, schools need to emphasize 21st century skills such as analyzing, synthesizing, and creating along with understanding and…

This article presents a critical discussion of the implications of allocating the most experienced and skilled teachers in schools to teacher leadership positions. Placing such teachers in leadership positions supports school improvement initiatives, but it can also pull valuable teaching resources from the classroom. The article examines this…

The present article reports on a case study into the influence and impact of action research carried out by teachers in a special school. The action research was an important component of the two-year, post-initial, in-service course in special educational needs, provided by Fontys University of Applied Sciences, Department of Inclusive and…

This paper reports one major finding from a large two-year, mixed-methods study that investigated the process of beginning teachers' learning to teach with information and communication technology (ICT). Among the ten participants involved in the qualitative portion of the study, three stood out from the rest in their effort to use ICT in…

While prior research has documented differences in the distribution of teacher characteristics across schools serving different student populations, few studies have examined how teacher sorting occurs within schools. Comparing teachers who teach in the same grade and school in a given year, the authors find less experienced, minority, and female…

This monograph appears midway through the development of a book on the future of teaching, scheduled for publication in the fall of 2010. The book is a team effort, undertaken by 12 accomplished educators from across the United States, who have agreed to systematically study and speculate about public education and the teaching profession in the…

The 2012 National Survey of Science and Mathematics Education was designed to provide up-to-date information and to identify trends in the areas of teacher background and experience, curriculum and instruction, and the availability and use of instructional resources. A total of 7,752 science and mathematics teachers in schools across the United…

Countries reforming their education systems frequently look outside of their borders for best practice and seek to import policies, practices and programs that appear to incorporate it. In so doing they appear to contribute to the increasing globalization of education. Scholars of comparative education examining this process have focused on the…