Background/Context: Low-income, racially minoritized, and first-generation college students (at-promise students) attending predominantly White, middle class institutions often face inequitable access to enriching educational opportunities, discrimination, and marginalization, creating barriers to their success. Institutions are increasingly…

Background: Research groups are social locations where teaching and learning merge among students and a principal investigator (PI). When joining, some students are able to contribute to groundbreaking research that addresses complex problems, under the direction of their PI. However, there are accounts of students having a wide range of negative…

Background or Context: During the first months of the COVID pandemic, teachers were forced to move to online instruction without the appropriate resources. They resorted to social media to gather expertise and ideas. This study is grounded in an analysis of the questions posed by K-12 teachers on popular Facebook groups. Purpose, Objective,…

Background/Context: When new, rigorous standards are adopted, teachers often need to learn new content and new ways of teaching while concurrently attending to accountability demands. Both formal and informal school structures potentially enable this new learning, and school leaders likely influence the nature of these structures.…

Background/Context: This study contributes to ongoing work in professional learning communities, self-study, and reflection. It offers a structure and a process rooted in a philosophy of practice grounded in various thinkers like Dewey, Rogers, Curran, Freire, Gattegno, Greene, and Carini. Purpose/Objective: The purpose of this study is to explore…

Purpose: The purpose of this article is to outline the evidence-based development of a learning approach to school renewal that employs information from key members of a school community (teachers, parents, students) to promote school-based discussions about school renewal. Setting: The study took place in an independent system of Catholic…

Background and Context: Continuous improvement and networked improvement science have emerged as prominent approaches to improving schools. Although continuous improvement approaches have generated promising results in education, how these efforts come to be enacted remains a crucial question that can generate insight into how these approaches can…

Background/Context: Teachers face many different problems in teaching. Traditionally, research examines the complexity of teaching students and content by focusing on a teacher's physical space and influencing factors therein. While established conceptions of curricular enactment suggest that instructional materials shape both the intended and…

Background: Focusing on ways a common endeavor brings people together, Gee offered the concept of affinity spaces, which suggests that open participation without exclusion or membership is possible. This theory contrasts with Lave and Wenger's communities of practice, which called attention to situated, hierarchical participatory practices.…

Background: The existence of many conflicted cities like Jerusalem creates a need for intercultural professional development (PD) for teachers. It is important to understand what teachers learn from their participation in such programs and how they are affected personally and professionally by their encounters with the other. The current study…

Background/Context: Continuous improvement methods are becoming increasingly popular in education. Existing research has emphasized the technical aspects of improvement practice and has rarely focused on important social phenomena that underlie improvement work, such as the mindsets and identities of successful practitioners. To address this gap,…

Background/Context: The landscape of English-medium independent schools today is increasingly multilingual, challenging traditional monolingual norms of English testing and teaching. Multilingual learners--students who are able to navigate school in more than one language--are more vulnerable to the negative impacts of standardized tests in…

Background: Mathematics education is not often identified as the locus of radical social change work, with these topics assumed instead as fodder for social studies or language arts lessons. As such, teachers of mathematics can struggle to find avenues for their commitments to social and educational justice in their mathematics teaching spaces.…

Background/Context: As a major area of civic decision making, public education is a central arena for advocacy groups seeking to influence policy debates. An emerging body of research examines advocates' use of social media. While debates about policy can be thought of as a clash of large ideas contained within frames, cognitive linguists note…

Background/Context: Educators around the country are working individually and collectively to improve teaching and learning. Despite marked progress in some places driven by these improvement efforts, overall progress in the education field has been slow and outcomes remain highly variable. This is partly because the field is not organized to…