Although teachers make frequent decisions about whether and how to address difficult topics, they typically do so with minimal support. This article reports a case study of an inquiry community of 20 educators who engaged in practitioner inquiry as professional learning for addressing the difficult topics that they teach within their curricula or…

This study investigated what happened during the implementation of a co-teaching model for student-teaching from a relational perspective. When analyzed through the theoretical framework of care ethics, teacher-candidates and their mentor-teachers developed caring relationships, acknowledged and negotiated differential power dynamics, and…

Calls for the renewal of teacher preparation through clinical practice have left many novice teacher educators to learn on the job. This article reports on the research of two such novices, studying their own practice. Addressing the need to better understand the approaches teacher educators take to clinically grounding their work, the authors…

Classroom videos can make instructional practice public, cultivating collaborative, critical teacher discussions. However, video-based learning also involves a risk--the risk of hurting one's own or a colleague's public image, or face. In this study, we investigate the role of face threat and face management in teacher professional learning in 16…

The Core Practices Movement (CPM) and Social Justice Teacher Education (SJTE) represent two communities of practice within which novices develop as professional educators. However, there is little dialogue about how they might collaborate to develop novice social justice educators, and the critiques and recommendations that do cross movements…

In collaborative groups, teachers negotiate the tension between working as a cohesive group and confronting differences of opinion and practice. Varied status between teachers can complicate their ability to accomplish the goals of collaboration. In this case study, we describe how a group of secondary English teachers redesigned curriculum and…

Teacher professional learning is considered crucial for improving the quality of education. Teacher collaboration in professional learning communities can contribute to the effectiveness of professional development efforts. In the past decade, there has been a shift from within-school to between-school professional learning communities. However,…

Facilitating discussions in English Language Arts can develop students' skills as speakers and listeners and their ability to engage with diverse perspectives. However, classroom observations often demonstrate a lack of student talk, raising questions about the complexity of facilitating discussion and teachers' opportunities to learn and hone the…

In recent years, work in practice-based teacher education has focused on identifying and elaborating how teacher educators (TEs) use pedagogies of enactment to learn in and from practice. However, research on these pedagogies is still in its early development. Building on prior analyses, this article elaborates a particular pedagogy of enactment,…

This article measures and discusses six teacher groups' (a) time spent working with data and (b) time devoted to particular kinds of inquiry activities, and explores various contextual factors that influence these results. The authors make use of a framework useful in describing and analyzing the stance taken by teachers when they engage with…

Many school-improvement efforts include time for teacher collaboration, with the assumption that teachers' collective work supports instructional improvement. However, not all collaboration equally supports learning that would support improvement. As a part of a 5-year study in two urban school districts, we collected video records of more than…

Support for new forms of teaching expertise with rigorous and equitable outcomes for student learning is a particular challenge when communities of actors working together do not share a similar language or vision of teaching practice. For this project, we coordinated activities in and outside of secondary science classrooms for cooperating…

Video is being used more widely in professional development to help teachers learn to notice and systematically analyze teaching practice. Video captures the authenticity and complexity of teaching and can promote the examination of classroom interactions in a deliberate and focused way. However, simply viewing video does not ensure teacher…

Student teaching has long been considered a cornerstone of teacher preparation. One dimension thought to affect student teacher learning is the kinds of schools in which these experiences occur. Drawing on extensive survey and administrative data on all teachers, students, and schools in a large, urban district, this study investigates whether…

The state of Florida has taken an unprecedented approach to teacher professional development in its Race to the Top (RTTT) Program application by proposing to promote an international innovation that originates in Japan, "lesson study," as a statewide teacher professional development model. Since winning the US$700 million RTTT funding…