Rachel Malchow Lloyd describes the wonderful and quite natural potential for a team of teachers, through their professional conversations and routine planning, to model for less experienced teachers how to prepare for instruction, how to assess its effect, and how to assume a professional stance consistently in the daily execution of…

This study presents the results of a self-study of interdisciplinary work that has generated profound changes in our teaching practices. The research grew out of an interest in exploring the nature of our work and the practices that contribute to its success. Our self-study revealed that our work process consists of five stages and is the product…

Professional development provides a means to build capacity among school personnel when it is delivered as part of a systematic, long-term approach to school and teacher improvement. This research examines a sustained, diocesan-wide professional development model, called the ACE Collaborative for Academic Excellence, that aims to build capacity…

Enhancing quality of instruction can be defined as the main purpose of instructional evaluation procedures in universities. Many universities collect and analyze feedback information from student ratings for the purpose of instructional improvement. Nevertheless, concrete research evidence is still needed to explore whether this purpose has been…

For the past 30?years, beginning with the seminal work of Herbert Marsh in Australia and New Zealand, institutions of higher education have developed internal practices and procedures to collect and analyse student evaluations of teaching and learning. However, the question remains: has this development resulted in the achievement of institutional…

Teachers need career pathways that provide new challenges and sustained opportunities for leadership without leaving the classroom. Better opportunities for leadership and innovative pathways help to increase the retention of strong teachers. Although few such programs existed several years ago, a growing number of states, districts, charter…

Professional development in education has gotten a bad reputation, and for good reason. Everyone on all sides of the education reform and improvement debate agrees that what most teachers receive as professional opportunities to learn are thin, sporadic, and of little use when it comes to improving teaching. This paper is the first of a periodic…

Previous studies have reported on primary children's algebraic thinking and generalising in a range of problem settings but there is little evidence of primary teachers' knowledge of algebraic thinking. In this paper the development in algebraic thinking of one primary teacher who taught a research lesson in a Japanese Lesson Study project…

A well-designed professional development program can help first- and second-year faculty thrive in their new academic environment. Faculty developers must consider the length and frequency of such programs and their focus; requirements for participation; the role of mentors; ways to establish collegiality; and opportunities for developing the…

Background/Context: Throughout schooling, English learners (ELs) perform well below their monolingual English-speaking peers on literacy assessments, and Hispanics make up the majority of EL students in the United States. There is a strong consensus about the importance of early English oral language skills for ELs' literacy development, yet…

Although global initiatives have brought attention to the lack of quality in education systems worldwide; the question remains, how do we implement quality education? Teachers, a vital component of the education process, are not usually included in these global conversations; this results in government initiatives missing key obstacles faced by…

The Education Resource Strategies (ERS) School System 20/20 is a framework to guide district transformation so that every school succeeds for every student because of the system--not in spite of it. This summary presents highlights from a case study that uses the framework School System 20/20 to examine how Denver Public Schools is transforming…

Can students teach their professors? The purpose of this study was to determine if students provided more immediate feedback to the professor on what engaged them and what distanced them in their learning and if the professor made changes to course delivery based on that feedback, would students become more engaged in their learning. In this…

The author presents themes that were identified from a case study that focused on the instructional practices of an award-winning community college composition/literature teacher. The themes for this case study focus on the importance of student-centered learning which involve: (1) writing peer response strategies; (2) student engagement in using…

Beginning primary teachers' knowledge and beliefs were assessed at the end of teacher education and 4 years later. In addition, they reported about their school context and job satisfaction and took a video-based assessment on their perception, interpretation, and decision-making skills. Research questions were (1) whether we have to deal with a…