Independent schools are increasingly looking to research as a strategy for building equitable systems and practices, through the creation of an embedded researcher position. This commentary grapples with how independent schools are building internal research capacity find. Using a self-study methodology with interviews, job document review, and…

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/Context: High quality early education, preschool through third grade, has received significant attention as a vehicle for addressing academic disparities. Research-practice partnerships (RPPs) offer a promising strategy for improving early education and closing the gap between research and practice; however, RPPs in the early learning…

Background/Context: Educational research tends to borrow accounts of justice from scholarship embedded within the structures and commitments of other disciplines or fields of study. This has created a body of educational research that largely responds to the "justice" goals of those disciplines rather than education qua education.…

Background: Substantial research on reform implementation highlights numerous challenges to implementing innovations at scale with depth and sustainability, yet new reforms continue to encounter many of the same challenges. This has led to calls for researchers to work in partnership with practitioners to design, implement, and scale educational…

Background: Despite increasing popularity and mounting evidence for teacher collaboration as a lever for school improvement, reported changes in teaching associated with collaboration are often subtle and incremental, rarely involving substantial shifts in instructional practice called for by advocates of deeper learning and next-generation…

Background/Context: School leaders, teachers, and researchers are increasingly involved in collaborative research and development (R&D) projects in schools, which encourage crossing boundaries between the fields of school and research. It is not clear, however, what and how professionals in these projects learn through cross-professional…

Background/Context: Questions about teacher quality, including how teachers ought to be educated and licensed, rank near the top of the educational agenda in the United States. These controversies persist because of lack of consensus about what "teacher quality" means, conflicting claims about the empirical evidence, and public skepticism about…

Background/Context: Educational and societal phenomena can converge to draw attention to a new focus, such as ELs and STEM, and then trigger new research interests. A funding program can play a critical role in shaping these new research interests by prioritizing specific research topics and designs or by requiring particular specializations of…

This commentary on the special issue on data use highlights the distinctions between data systems intended to improve the performance of school staff and those intended to hold schools and districts accountable for outcomes. It advises researchers to be alert to the differences in the policy logics connected with each approach.

Background/Context: Learning to meet students' needs challenges new teachers often focused on procedures, management, materials, and curriculum. To avoid this development pattern, student teachers (STs) need opportunities to concentrate especially on needs of culturally and linguistically diverse (CLD) students. Teacher inquiry (TI) holds promise…

Background: The field of higher education abounds with qualitative research aimed at highlighting the needs, struggles, strengths, and motivations of academically struggling students. However, because of the small-scale nature of these studies, they rarely enter the public debate or impact institutional policy concerning access, remediation,…

Background/Context: The open access movement has successfully drawn attention to economic and political aspects of scholarly communication through a significant body of commentary that debates the merits of open access and the potential damage it may do to scholarly publishing. Researchers within the field of education research, notably John…

Background/Context: Most accounts of teacher attrition fall into one or both of the following categories: teacher life cycle and workplace conditions. Many educational researchers have described and analyzed teaching in moral and ethical terms. Despite the numerous articles and books that study the personal convictions of teachers, a sustained…

Background/Context: Given the challenging complexity of the modern principalship--including high-stakes testing, standards-based reform, increased accountability, and severe budget cuts--practitioners and scholars emphasize the urgency of supporting principals' stress-relief and renewal. Purpose/Objective/Research Question/Focus of Study: This…