This article documents the innovative practices and initial outcomes from the Grand Rapids Engaged Department Initiative, a cross-institutional collaboration designed in response to the failures of higher education to systematically engage in place. Created to incentivize and resource systemic and cultural shifts across three institutions of…

Written by the director and staff of the first, and one of the largest, teaching centers in American higher education--the University of Michigan's Center for Research on Learning and Teaching (CRLT)--this book offers a unique perspective on the strategies for making a teaching center integral to an institution's educational mission. It presents a…

Describes the "Book Club Plus Inquiry Group," a group of classroom teachers and university teacher educators in Michigan involved in practitioner research. Offers perspectives from the group on the question of what counts as teacher research. Concludes with a model of their conception. (SR)

Educational collaboratives are organizations in which educational administrators, university and college faculty, classroom teachers, intermediate district staff, and graduate and undergraduate students share energy, expertise, time, and other resources to plan and implement joint programs of preservice and inservice education, action research,…

Two teacher educators utilized professional standards to inform their teaching. They used reflective dialog, action research, and critical inquiry in a standards-based language arts curriculum to support revisions and improvements in classroom practices and curriculum development. This led to new ideas about collaborative structures and stimulated…