In this collaborative, multi-voice paper we tell the story of our design collaboration. By describing the process of one design team of teacher educators, we offer a template of what it means to center teachers' lives and experiences as we design professional development with and for them.

Kathy Hirsh-Pasek is the Stanley and Debra Lefkowitz Faculty Fellow in the Department of Psychology at Temple University and a Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution. She is the past president of the International Society for Infant Studies, served as the Associate Editor of "Child Development" and is on the governing counsel of the…

Kappan's editor-in-chief talks with renowned scholar Susan Moore Johnson about her extensive research into the professional lives of public school teachers. For decades, studies have shown that teaching tends to be isolating work, with few opportunities for teachers to collaborate with and learn from each other or to play meaningful roles in…

To cope with the rapidly changing higher education climate, teachers need agency to act proactively in initiating and steering changes in practice. This paper describes an academic development activity in the form of a Change Laboratory, an intervention method based on Cultural-Historical Activity Theory, to facilitate agency among teachers. The…

This paper analyses the nature of collaborative teacher learning as a form of 'public sphere', under current policy conditions. The research draws upon Habermas' notions of communicative action and public spheres, and literature on the nature of teachers' learning in the context of standardized curriculum and assessment reform, to analyse how…

Nowadays, in Catalonia, students with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) are increasingly in regular schools although their presence, participation, learning and success are unequal. Barriers towards inclusion often depend on how to organise supporting at regular schools and the teachers' collaboration during this process. In this paper, the support…

This study investigated how a group of English teachers engaged in collaboration through joint lesson planning in a Chinese school. Drawing on data from interviews and field observation, the findings indicate that the establishment of a teacher collaborative culture is a developmental process permeated with various contextual challenges (i.e., a…

This project focuses on the design and implementation of an online professional development platform tailored to teachers' needs to improve and promote their intercultural knowledge. Drawing upon the framework of virtual communities of practice, the project escapes from traditional professional development programmes. Although a total of 103…

Schools are valuable venues for research institutions. Research can also be beneficial to public schools. School administrators should be proactive in identifying research topics and establishing standards and expectations for the university researchers. This article describes the partnership between a university researcher and a K-12 director of…

Purpose: This commentary aims to echo Wilkinson, Bailey, and Maher's (this volume) arguments about the affordances of videos and video databases in studying learning and teaching. Design/Approach/Methods: This article illustrates a multivocal approach to the videos from the "Video Mosaic Collaborative" (VMC). In particular, three…

This study contributes to research on teacher collaboration, which has not adequately examined the supports and challenges to English for speakers of other languages (ESOL) specialists and mainstream classroom teachers sharing roles in a student-centered classroom. Using a sociocultural theoretical framework, this study highlights the importance…

Secondary science teachers spend most of their time planning, collaborating, and teaching, but spend little time reflecting after teaching a single lesson. The theoretical framework of the adult learning theory and the transformative learning theory was the basis of this study. This qualitative research study was conducted to understand the…

A popular trend fusing regular and special education, co-teaching aims to combine the content expertise of a general education teacher with a special education teacher's understanding of meeting the needs of a range of learners for the good of all students. Co-teaching also serves as a vehicle for actualizing characteristics of successful schools…

In this study, the authors sought to uncover the characteristics of professional development (PD) that were identified by teacher-participants as being important to their implementation of project ideas. Using phenomenological interviewing, the authors talked with nine teacher-participants about changes to their teaching practices after they…

In English primary schools, provision of musical music lessons is often lacking. This paper focuses on whether a lack of clarity around primary music pedagogy might be a contributing factor. Some comparisons are drawn with the realm of second-language teaching. A small qualitative study is reported in which three teacher-educators with…