The study discusses the professional identity and aspects of professional development of Clinical Faculty Teacher Educators (CFTEs) teaching methods courses in a College of Education during a time of change. The above aspects were revealed while analyzing data collected to evaluate an in-service professional development course for CFTEs. Data…

In this paper we examine aspects of the construction of authentic membership, competence, and sense of shared purpose within a professional community of educators accomplished by a class of pre-service teachers during a spontaneous electronic conversation. Implications for teacher education are considered.

Improving teacher quality in P-12 mathematics is a national need, and many universities and schools are working to address it. With the support of the National Science Foundation (NSF), twelve math and science institutes across the country are helping P-12 teachers strengthen their capacity to support students' learning. These NSF Institutes…

The Presenters' Collaborative Network (PCN) was started in 2002 to support the creation of a corps of teacher-consultants who would lead workshops for the Rhode Island Writing Project (RIWP) at local schools and conferences. The PCN is a group of teachers, past participants from summer institutes or year-round embedded programs in schools that…

This article describes the development, implementation, and evaluation of a year-long research learning community to assist doctoral students with developing confidence, knowledge, and skills necessary to become competent rehabilitation researchers. In the first section, we describe some of the challenges confronted by doctoral students as they…

Rehabilitation counselor education is experiencing an explosion of knowledge, which is becoming increasingly difficult to organize and disseminate to students. Communities of practice, a form of social learning, provide a way to organize and disseminate information. Distance-based education programs are increasing within the field of…

This article considers some of the key processes and methods needed to reenvision and transform comprehensive school counseling programs (CSCPs) as strengths-based, prevention-focused learning communities. Specifically, following a discussion of evidence-based "school as community" models found in the literature and how they relate, in part, to…

This article describes two models for enhancing the social integration of nontraditional students in academic programs. The first explains ways to develop onsite communities for both graduate and undergraduate degree-seeking students at New York University. The second model is used with undergraduate students at Washington State University seeking…

This paper provides information on the policy strand of an investigation into the Australian Research Council Linkage research project into "interactive distance e-learning" [IDeL] following the introduction in New South Wales and in the Northern Territory of Australia of satellite-supported two-way broad-band internet services for…

Purpose: How people learn and create knowledge together through interactions in communities of practice (CoPs) is not fully understood. The purpose of this paper is to create and apply a model that could increase participants' consciousness about knowledge creation processes. Design/methodology/approach: This four-month qualitative research was…

One of the greatest challenges instructors face is getting students to connect with the subject in a manner that encourages them to learn. In this essay, we describe the redesign of our Developmental Biology course to foster a deeper connection between students and the field of developmental biology. In our approach, we created a community of…

Despite the prevalence of professional development in schools and the variability in its implementation, little research has been conducted on how professional development makes its way into the classroom. Even when teachers participate in high-quality professional development, there remains a large and often undocumented variability in how…

The research reported here follows previous articles in this special issue which detail a national study involving a team of researchers across four higher education institutions in New Zealand. A key theme that emerged from a collection of questionnaire, interview and observational data was the central importance of teacher-student and…

This study argues that the shift towards a more multidisciplinary professional life in contemporary design practice requires design curricula to equip students with collaborative skills. The study offers that by the aid of web-based collaborative learning (WBCL) in design education, different disciplines may be brought together during their…

This article explores the leadership of school principals with respect to faculty study group development as a key element of the professional learning community. Questions asked concern the approaches that principals use to facilitate study group processes that, in turn. foster teacher learning and student achievement, and ways in which…