This study reflects the voice of school leaders (principals) in a Norwegian school development project focusing on assessment for learning (AfL). The central role of the principal in school improvement is well documented, however, less is written about how the principals themselves see their roles. The voices presented belong to two experienced…

Every teacher dreams of the perfect, well-behaved class, but the reality can be quite different. On those less-than-perfect days, having a system in place helps you and your students stay on track. This gold mine of teacher-developed and -approved strategies goes beyond classroom management theory and gives you ready-to-use tools that not only…

When speaking of educational leadership today there are many characteristics of leadership that are needed that perhaps were not necessary five, ten, or fifteen years ago. Technology's impact on how students learn and how teachers teach has had educational leadership think about more innovative ways in which to prepare, deliver, and assess…

During a teaching methods field experience, we initiated several processes to facilitate pre-service teachers' reflection, empowerment, and performance as they learned to teach students. Through an ethno-theater presentation and subsequent revisions to an ethno-theater script, we turned the reflective lens on ourselves as we discovered instances…

This article provides a context for understanding how social networks among teachers support or constrain school improvement in terms of instructional practice, professional development, and educational reform. It comments on the articles in this special issue, summarizing their contributions to the field. This analysis reveals several important…

We report on a three-year study of teachers' experiences of a major reform of the science National Curriculum for 14- to 16-year-olds in England. Teachers' responses to this curriculum reform were guided by: "personal" aims and biography; "internal" features of their workplace such as departmental collegiality; and…

The Ministry of Education in Israel has, over the past two years, been running an education program designed to lead the implementation of ICT (Information and Communications Technology) in schools. Implementation of the program is accompanied by training and support of teachers selected to be ICT leaders. The role of the ICT leader is divided to…

This paper describes the development of curriculum design expertise from the perspective of a teacher reflecting on a science lesson. His involvement in the research process resulted in a self-determined professional development strategy. The description comes from data collected through lesson observations and an in-depth stimulated recall…

Implementing teacher evaluation systems across the United States has created both challenges and opportunities to improving teacher quality. Lessons learned at the state level illustrate a wide range of challenges with system implementation, including value-added growth scores, implementation timetables, and human capital demands (McGuinn, 2012),…

The aim of this paper is to demonstrate the efficacy of using ePortfolios to enhance career skills for newly qualified teachers (NQTs). The context is the final phase of a longitudinal action research project investigating whether an ePortfolio, created as a pre-service teacher to evidence a digital story of developing professional identity, could…

Like high-stakes student assessment, high-stakes teacher evaluation threatens to be an occasional event that is disconnected from day-to-day teaching and learning, producing results that do not help teachers improve their performance and placing teachers in a passive role as recipients of external judgment. For several years, the authors have…

The identity of the teacher has been determined to influence classroom practices. Positional identity is defined as one's perception of self relative to others. This qualitative research study investigates the positional identity of five high school science teachers of different ethnicities and how their positional identities influence their…

This study investigated the relationship between two elementary building administrators and their teaching faculty with regard to leadership styles of the principal. Leadership analysis determined that one principal had a transformational leadership and one principal who had a transactional leadership style. A survey assessed the perceptions of…

In this theoretical paper the role of power in classroom interactions is examined in terms of a dominance continuum to advance a theoretical framework justifying the emergence of three ways of distributing power when it comes to dealing with the control over the teaching-studying-learning (TSL) "pattern of teacher domination," "pattern of…

View through a power perspective, this article critically evaluates tensions involved in China's school-based curriculum development (SBCD) in middle schools: the state's concern about control, accountability, and schools' eagerness to struggle for more decision-making power. This article examines how a Chinese school and its teachers go beyond…