During the summer, we interviewed Tony Bryk, Author of Learning to Improve: How America's Schools Can Get Better at Getting Better and head of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. His work was seminal in the creation of the Framework for Great Schools, which has spurred New York City schools to rethink the structures and…

The authors seek to find common PLC structures and actions among global educational systems to enhance understanding and practice. Six international researchers formed the Global Professional Learning Community Network (GloPLCNet), conducted literature reviews of each country's involvement with PLC actions, and noted similarities and common…

Pressures are increasing on educational policy and practice to use research to guide improvement. Recently there have been concerted efforts to forge new and different kinds of relationships between researchers and practitioners. School districts across the country are developing a new kind of partnership with researchers. These research-practice…

Educational researchers are concerned about the ways in which researcher identity can influence practice and findings for better or worse effect. However, writings which offer narratives, intended to instruct others in the ways in which the positioning and reflexivity of the researcher operates for better or worse, often present a view of identity…

Teachers hold the key to school reform. Professional learning communities--as well as other related strategies, including collaborative and distributive models of leadership--offer much that is promising. Yet, weaknesses documented in research require attention. We conducted a study of teachers in two elementary schools identified as exemplary…

In the 2007-2008 school year, the New York City Department of Education and the United Federation of Teachers jointly implemented the Schoolwide Performance Bonus Program in a random sample of the city's high-needs public schools. The program lasted for three school years, and its broad objective was to improve student performance through…

This article takes the history of teacher research in one large urban school district over a period of 20 years as a telling case of the intensely local character of this work. Beginning with an overview of the variations and different conceptions of teacher research in the USA, we argue that teacher research is continually being invented and…

For decades teacher leadership has been widely promoted by policy makers and education leaders as a prime strategy for improving the educational enterprise. As practitioners of exemplary teaching, as innovators of pedagogy and curriculum, and as promoters of high-quality instruction for all students, teacher leaders are uniquely positioned to…

Supporting Teachers as Action Researchers (STAR) explores how school improvement initiatives may be sustained over time. It represents stage one of a broader investigation into how teachers' professional learning may be enhanced by positioning teachers as practitioner researchers and professionals who are capable of generating change from within…

A year-long collaborative action research project used networked technologies to connect researchers at a university-based online professional development program and a group of practitioner researchers based in a range of schools and educational agencies in several countries. They studied the process and effects of online professional development…

In 2002, the RAND Corporation launched a project to understand how educators are responding to the new accountability requirements in California, Georgia, and Pennsylvania--three states that represent a range of approaches, regions, and student populations. The researchers aimed to identify the factors that enhance the implementation of SBA…

Promoting local development in order to support school improvement is an important aspect of contemporary educational policy in Sweden. Recent state initiatives have sought to combine curriculum and teacher development. A common form of cooperation is facilitation, where academics support groups of teachers in their school projects. This article…