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The National Association for Professional Development Schools (NAPDS) recognizes that there is a tendency for the term “PDS” (Professional Development School) to be used as a catch-all for various relationships that constitute school–university partnership work. The intent of this NAPDS statement is to assert the essentials, or fundamental qualities, of a PDS. NAPDS encourages all those working in school–university relationships to embrace the Nine Essentials of PDSs communicated in this statement. The Essentials are written in tangible, rather than abstract, language and represent practical goals toward which work in a PDS should be directed.

Policy statement.

NAPDS maintains that these Nine Essentials need to be present for a school-university relationship to be called a PDS. Without having all nine, the relationship that exists between a school/district and college/university, albeit however strong, would not be a PDS. How individual PDSs meet these essentials will vary from location to location, but they all need to be in place to justify the use of the term “PDS.”

For those in established PDSs, some aspects of this document will be confirmed, while other aspects may be identified as needing attention. For those aspiring to establish PDSs, the authors offer this statement as a useful guide for their work. NAPDS invites individuals involved in school–university partnerships to share this statement with colleagues in the spirit of continuous improvement. By coming to terms with the challenges and opportunities inherent in this statement, the study can collectively fulfill the vision of this remarkable and distinct partnership called PDS.

This policy statement articulates how the Nine Essentials are the foundation of PDS work.

The purpose of this study is to gain insight into the dynamics and considerations of professionals regarding the sharing of tacit, personal knowledge in their practice.

Adopting a social-constructivist ontology, the qualitative design deploys semi-structured interviews and focus groups. Data were coded, and analysed through interrelating and reasoning.

Personal knowledge is difficult to share precisely, but can be shared to some extent using reflection and stories. Knowledge also provides a position and professional agency, emphasising boundaries and impacting the decisions on interaction and sharing. As such, professional commitment is vulnerable and contextual and, by extension, material becomes part of this interplay of professional practice and collaborative development.

Findings imply that exchange and use of knowledge and material present in organisations are impacted by individual professionals’ autonomy and decisions, which consequently impact on employees’ practice. This calls for research that focuses on individual factors such as autonomy, professionalism and attitudes in addition to organisational and facilitative matters.

Stimulating professional commitment and interpersonal learning is a matter of valuing personal knowledge and practice to avoid protectionism, boundaries and segregated agency. Management and professionals should consider how and why individuals exchange their personal knowledge, paying attention to social structures and individuals’ voices and objectives in forming communities.

This study combines the concept of tacit knowledge with the younger field of practice theory. By connecting personal knowledge to practice, it extends agency to the material world and offers a more individual perspective to knowledge sharing in and between entities.

The purpose of this study is to assess teachers' and principals' perception towards the role of collective learning (CL) and application in building professional learning communities (PLCs) in schools in one selected circuit in the Zambezi Region.

Quantitative research method was used, and the data were collected using PLCs’ questionnaires revised for circuit and region in Namibia. A total of 340 teachers and principals in primary, combined and secondary schools were involved in this research. Based on teachers and principals' assessment, high- and low-performing factors of CL are presented and explained.

The major findings are that the majority of participants either strongly agreed or agreed with almost all the statements. It was only in the statement that “teachers and the broader community role players come together to discuss better ways to solve problems” that a majority of participants disagreed. This research challenges all those involved in building up PLCs to think more about CL when they are in the process of structuring their schools as PLCs.

This article is the original work of these authors and has not been submitted to other journals for publication.

The emergence of networks within education has been driven by a number of factors, including: the complex nature of the issues facing education, which are typically too great for single schools to tackle by themselves; changes to educational governance structures, which involve the hollowing out of the middle tier and the introduction of new approaches with an individualized focus; in addition is the increased emphasis on education systems that are “self-improving and school-led”. Within this context, the realization of teacher and school improvement actively emerges from establishing cultures of enquiry and learning, both within and across schools. Since not every teacher in a school can collaboratively learn with every other teacher in a network, the most efficient formation of networks will comprise small numbers of teachers learning on behalf of others.

Within this context, Professional Learning Networks (PLNs) are defined as any group who engage in collaborative learning with others outside of their everyday community of practice; with the ultimate aim of PLN activity being to improve outcomes for children. Research suggests that the use of PLNs can be effective in supporting school improvement. In addition, PLNs are an effective way to enable schools to collaborate to improve educational provision in disadvantaged areas. Nonetheless harnessing the benefits of PLNs is not without challenge. In response, this paper explores the notion of PLNs in detail; it also sheds light on the key factors and conditions that need to be present if PLNs are to lead to sustained improvements in teaching and learning. In particular, the paper explores the role of school leaders in creating meaningful two-way links between PLNs and their schools, in order to ensure that both teachers and students benefit from the collaborative learning activity that PLNs foster. The paper concludes by suggesting possible future research in this area.

The South African vocational education and training (VET) sector is required by legislation to redefine postsecondary education, advance industrialisation and expand the job market to address unemployment in the country. Yet, VET leaders' heterogenous educational and occupational backgrounds do not enable them to address the needs of the VET sector. Continuous professional development of leaders in the education sector needs to include support structures such as mentoring.

The present study sought to investigate how VET managers in South Africa perceive three different types of mentoring – individual, peer group and expert-based key performance area (KPA) mentoring – during a part-time professional leadership development programme. Using interactive qualitative analysis (IQA), the authors collected and analysed data from focus group discussions (n = 24) and individual interviews (n = 21) from two cohorts of the programme.

The results revealed that individual mentoring represented the most important driving mechanism, followed by peer group mentoring and expert-based KPA mentoring. Participants identified leadership as a prerequisite for their development. Emotions formed the final outcome of the mentoring framework.

Based on the findings, the authors suggest investigating the role played by leaders' interpersonal competences such as emotional competence in the workplace. Additionally, research needs to clarify if and how mentoring can support leaders to develop interpersonal competences in formal and informal settings.

The study offers empirical evidence on a three-pillar mentoring framework adopted in a professional development programme for leaders in VET in South Africa. It highlights the importance of individual, social and emotional factors.

This study aims to describe and evaluate various visual and creative tools for supporting the in-depth biographical interview aimed at analyzing educational communities and their stakeholders.

Researching educational spaces today requires new ways of understanding, analyzing and studying. The complex characteristics, functions and realities demand research that responds to educational singularities. It is a matter of deeply understanding the educational phenomenon's peculiarities. For these purposes, instruments and research paradigms are needed to extract data and reach information saturation regarding the data obtained from the proposed objects of study. With this in mind, the following paper suggests reflecting on data collection tools that can complement the interview and biographical-narrative research approach. The authors highlight the use of photo-elucidation, the biogram-based timeline, the organigram and the flight of the geese, all of which are instruments endowed with a visual character that allows a deeper understanding of the object studied.

The main contribution of this paper is to unpack the uses and applications of four visual tools that support the interview technique. First, photo-elucidation is presented as a sensory strategy to stimulate the narrative during the dialogical exchange of the interview. Next, the timeline is described as a visual concretization of the traditional biogram widely used in educational research. Next, the authors unravel the uses of the organizational chart in educational research, which, due to its nature and utility, provides a glimpse of the organizational functioning of an institution and is particularly suitable for research in institutional frameworks. Finally, the tool known as the flight of the geese is presented. This tool is recommended for use in educational leadership and teamwork studies due to its simplicity and high representativeness of the hierarchy of roles and functions.

Researching educational spaces today requires new ways of understanding, analyzing and studying. The complex characteristics, functions, and realities demand research that responds to educational singularities. It is a matter of deeply understanding the educational phenomenon's peculiarities. For these purposes, instruments and research paradigms are needed to extract data and reach information saturation regarding the data obtained from the proposed objects of study. With this in mind, the following paper invites us to reflect on data collection tools that can complement the interview and biographical-narrative research approach. The authors highlight the use of photo-elucidation, the biogram-based timeline, the organigram, and the flight of the geese, all of which are instruments endowed with a visual character that allows a deeper understanding of the object studied.

Purpose: Urban centres have been argued to be crucial in the battle for sustainability. With more than half of the global population presently living in cities, the sustainability challenges of global warming, environmental degradation, social inequality, and economic recessions have continued to thrive. To this end, there have been efforts to revive and improve the existing physical and social structure of cities in a process known as urban regeneration. The aim of this paper is to explore the role of sustainability assessment frameworks in urban regeneration.

Approach: Aligning with the positivism philosophical position, and using document analysis as a data collection method, the study discusses the state of the art of urban regeneration and its application in recent times. The study also reviewed selected neighbourhood sustainability assessment frameworks as a tool for decision-making towards sustainability to know the extent in which they capture the goals of urban regeneration.

Findings: Findings showed that the uptake of the sustainability assessment frameworks could play a role in enhancing integration of local context, social wellbeing and economic prosperity, environmental quality, and stakeholder engagement at the neighbourhood level which are the main aspects of urban regeneration.

Theoretical and practical implications: In theory, this paper establishes the assumption that with some revisions, sustainability assessment frameworks could serve as a tool for decision-making in urban regeneration process. Practise-wise, urban regeneration at the neighbourhood level can now be measured against sustainability benchmarks and indicators.

The aim of this study is to explore the extent to which a transnational pedagogical training affected university teachers' approaches to teaching, as well as their efficacy beliefs and cultural perceptions, and to examine how such training could stimulate teachers' pedagogical-development processes beyond the specific context.

An explanatory sequential mixed-methods design was adopted for the study. Quantitative data were collected through an online self-reported questionnaire from two-independent samples, both before (n = 119) and after (n = 110) the training. Qualitative data were collected after the training through episodic narrative interviews with five teachers.

The quantitative and qualitative findings indicate contradictory aspects of the teaching approach and perceived culture. While the questionnaire responses highlighted the dominance of teacher-centred teaching approaches and an individualistic culture, a thematic analysis of the interview data showed that teachers experienced pedagogical development as (1) increasing student engagement, (2) improving their own teaching practices, (3) a community activity and (4) an institutionalised process.

The design of the current research may have limited the authors’ potential to deeply investigate the effect of the transnational pedagogical training, as only snapshots of the teachers' perceptions were elicited. Future studies might consider a within-subject longitudinal design to thoroughly follow teachers' trajectories in learning and development over time.

The research findings suggest that transnational pedagogical training initiatives are to be promoted amidst these uncertain times. Even though the focus of the study was not to explore the teachers' perceptions of teaching development during the pandemic, the current results imply that the mentioned training helped teachers in tailoring their pedagogical practices to suit the unexpected online teaching settings.

The study adds to the relatively new literature on the perceived effect of transnational pedagogical training initiatives. This study’s findings contribute to the body of knowledge related to pedagogical development in fragile and conflict-affected contexts.

The purpose of this study is to review and analyze the status of word-of-mouth (WOM) research in the business-to-business (B2B) context and discuss and identify new possible future directions.

A systematic review was conducted and 36 articles on B2B WOM were collected to evaluate the current state of the literature and clarify possible future research directions.

This thematic analysis categorize these articles into three themes: WOM generation, WOM usage and reference marketing. Under each theme, the authors reveal research findings unique to B2B research and different from business-to-consumer (B2C) WOM research. This study identifies several research questions that should be addressed by future research.

Both academic researchers and business practitioners recognize that WOM plays an essential role in B2B marketing. However, no review paper focuses on WOM in the B2B context. Findings in the B2C WOM literature suggest that WOM substantially influences firms’ performance, but that managers cannot simply attempt to extrapolate B2C findings to the B2B arena. By synthesizing and assessing prior research on WOM in the B2B context, this study contributes to a better understanding of the B2B WOM phenomenon and facilitates future research on this topic.

Understanding the outcomes of co-creation (CC) in healthcare is increasingly gaining multidisciplinary scientific interest. Although more and more service management scholars have pointed out the benefits of cross-fertilization between the various research fields, the literature on this topic is still scattered and poorly integrated. This study aims to summarize and integrate multiple strands of extant knowledge CC by identifying the outcomes of health CC and the determinants of these outcomes and their relationships.

A structured literature review was conducted per PRISMA guidelines. A total of 4,189 records were retrieved from the six databases; 1,983 articles were screened, with 161 included in the qualitative thematic analysis.

This study advances a comprehensive framework for healthcare CC based on a thorough analysis of the outcomes and their determinants, that is, antecedents, management activities and institutional context. Extant research rarely evaluates outcomes from a multidimensional and systemic perspective. Less attention has been paid to the relationship among the CC process elements.

This study offers an agenda to guide future studies on healthcare CC. Highlighting some areas of integration among different disciplines further advances service literature.

The framework offers an operational guide to better shape managerial endeavors to facilitate CC, provide direction and assess multiple outcomes.

This is the first extensive attempt to synthesize and integrate multidisciplinary knowledge on CC outcomes in healthcare settings by adopting a systematic perspective on the overall process.