The high performance of Japanese students, as demonstrated on international tests, is well-known, but the professional learning of Japanese teachers has received less attention. Ruth Ahn, Yasuko Shimojima, Hisayoshi Mori, and Shigeru Asanuma describe the professional development requirements for teachers across their careers. Novice teachers are…

Whether organized around subject matter, teaching methods, school improvement, or restructuring efforts, successful networks share common features, such as focus, variety, and opportunities for discourse and leadership. Networks can also present nagging problems concerned with quality, application, stability, overextension, ownership, expanding…

Overall, the research to date indicates that such innovations, when properly interpreted and implemented, may be a step toward educational improvement and are, in any case, valid alternatives to the traditional mode of teaching. (Author)

Describes the preoccupation of U.S. schools with "list logic": a conception of educational improvement that relies on the identification and prescription of a myriad of characteristics of effective schools, administrators, and teachers. Suggests reasons for this phenomenon and advocates the alternative of "communities of…