Because what we do in staff development can best be understood in terms of Contexts, Strategies, and Structures, the remainder of the book features distinguished educators who write from their own unique experiential and theoretical stances. Jacqueline Ancess describes how teachers in New York City secondary schools increase their own learning while improving student outcomes • Milbrey W. McLaughlin and Joel Zarrow demonstrate how teachers learn to use data to improve their practice and meet educational standards • Lynne Miller presents a case study of a long-lived school, university partnership • Beverly Falk recounts stories of teachers working together to develop performance assessments, to understand their student’s learning, to re-think their curriculum, and much more • Laura Stokes analyzes a school that successfully uses inquiry groups. There are further contributions (including some from novice teachers) by Anna Richert Ershler, Ann Lieberman, Diane Wood, Sarah Warshauer Freedman, and Joseph P. McDonald. These powerful exemplars from practice provide a much-needed overview of what matters and what really works in professional development today.

Everyone believes that sophomore honors student Ethan Lederer is a top-notch scholar and a great guy, but a new student helps Ethan to discover and disclose that he is just acting a role, even as she reveals her own mental instability.

Richard Lakin's collection is geared to teachers, principals, parents, and all those concerned with making schools more loving and effective for each child. He presents a close look at his school staff working together to create both a caring, challenging learning environment and a real partnership between school and home. In today's high stakes and test obsessed world, Teaching as an Act of Love encourages teachers as they remember why they entered teaching in the first place-to zero in on the individual child, "the whole child" and encourage the love of learning. In the 55 informative and optimistic pieces in the book, Richard proposes more personalized "smaller caring schools of choice," where the child comes first, where bureaucracy, testing and NCLB are minimized and where a loving school climate and kindness prevail

Teachers Investigate Their Work introduces the methods and concepts of action research through examples drawn from studies carried out by teachers. The book is arranged as a handbook with numerous sub-headings for easy reference and fourty-one practical methods and strategies to put into action, some of them flagged as suitable `starters'. Throughout the book, the authors draw on their international practical experience of action research, working in close collaboration with teachers. It is an essential guide for teachers, senior staff and co-ordinators of teacher professional development who are interested in investigating their own practice in order to improve it.

"Drago-Severson has created an indispensable resource for anyone who wants to learn how to be a school′s ′principal adult educator.′" —Robert Kegan, Meehan Professor of Adult Learning and Professional Development Harvard University Graduate School of Education "Helping Teachers Learn is a remarkably ambitious and comprehensive work that describes how principals may effectively exercise leadership in support of teacher learning within schools. The book is an extraordinary treasure chest of real-world examples, insights, and uncommon sense." —Richard H. Ackerman Author, The Wounded Leader A new learning-oriented leadership model to help principals support teacher development and growth! How can you, as a principal, create opportunities for teacher learning that really work to support teachers with different needs and preferences? There is wide agreement that the best teacher development is informal, diverse, democratic, school-based, and continuous. The best programs ignite and sustain teachers′ excitement in learning, growing, and changing their classroom practices. Drago-Severson presents case studies from 25 diverse schools across the U.S. and examines strategies that help shape a school climate of teacher support, growth, and learning. In addition, she suggests many creative solutions to secure any resources needed to implement this learning-oriented professional growth model. Concepts covered in Helping Teachers Learn include: A new model of learning-oriented leadership that can be tailored to particular settings or individuals Adult learning principles that inform teacher growth and development, and why they are essential to effective teacher development programs The Four Pillars: teaming, providing leadership roles, engaging in collegial inquiry, and mentoring Real-world examples of principals sharing leadership, building community, and managing change Enhance your professional development model to better support teacher growth and development, as well as your own self-development as a principal.

Common Core implementation begins with asking the right questions! While the Common Core couldn’t be clearer about what to teach, they never quite tackle how to teach. That’s what makes Inquiring into the Common Core such an essential resource. It offers teachers an inquiry-based professional development model for achieving greater understanding of the standards themselves, then determining best ways to realize desired outcomes. How exactly does the model work? Teachers take charge of their own professional development by posing questions, or wonderings, to stimulate action and higher-level insight into the big ambitions of the Common Core. At the very same time, they engage in a parallel process of inquiry with their students in service of the very same goals. Assisting teachers along the ways, Inquiring into the Common Core provides tools to systematically study teaching effectiveness while adapting to new standards classroom-ready, student inquiry techniques and strategies to apply within Common Core’s framework real life inquiry-implementation examples from a high-need, high-poverty school Ideal for both teams or individual teachers, there’s no better resource for laying the groundwork for successful and thought-provoking classroom actualization amid shifting times.

Good teacher education, informed by relevant research, is judged by policy makers and practitioners alike to be central to increasing the quality of schooling in many countries of the world. Yet, in the UK, research on teacher education is often acknowledged to be less well developed than other areas of educational research and to be over-determined by education policy. It has also been accused of a lack of rigour and of being atheoretical. A further challenge in developing good research in teacher education is that new teacher educators commonly face the challenge of moving into academic work without relevant research skills and the ready capacity to produce high quality research outputs. For these reasons, then, strengthening research in and on teacher education is high on educational agendas in the UK. This book examines the exact nature of these challenges in teacher education and the initiatives arising to address them in different settings across the four nations of the UK. The central theme of all the chapters is how to build ‘research capacity’ so that teacher education can contribute more strongly to the improvement of schooling, as well as becoming a high quality, research-informed enterprise in its own right. The insights will be valuable to teacher educators around the world. This book was published as a special issue of the Journal of Education and Teaching.