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The purpose of this paper is to review the findings from a study of teacher professional learning networks in Kenya. Specific areas of focus included network participation, network activities, network leadership, and professional impact on network members and their schools.

The research was grounded in the literature on education networks and teacher learning. The research employed a qualitative design and was implemented from September 2015–March 2017, including three two-week field trips to Kenya. Data included network records, 83 personal interviews, 4 focus group interviews, 19 observations of network meetings, and classroom observation of network and non-network teachers in 12 schools.

Network participation had positive effects on teachers’ sense of professionalism and commitment to teaching and on their attitudes toward ongoing professional learning and improvement in student learning. Teachers also highlighted network benefits for learning to use new teaching strategies and materials, responding to student misbehavior and misunderstanding, and lesson preparation.

Research constraints did not permit longitudinal investigation of network activities and outcomes.

The paper identifies challenges and potential focuses for strengthening the learning potential of network activities, network leadership, and the links between network activity and school improvement.

Prior research has investigated education networks mostly in North American and similar high income settings. This paper highlights the benefits and challenges for networks as a strategy for continuous teacher development in a low income low resource capacity context.

The purpose of this paper is to explore informal contexts of teachers' workplace professional learning and inform educational researchers, teacher educators, administrators and teachers about ways in which teachers learn to improve their practice. By questioning how teachers learn on‐the‐job to be better teachers and how school cultures position them as learners, this study seeks to generates hypotheses about relationships between the nature of workplace professional learning and its content and informal contexts.

An ethnographic design based on a grounded theory generates analytic categories from interviews, participants' reflective journals and field notes through comparison of learning environments in three contrasting schools in two countries – Lithuania and the USA. Discourse analysis is employed to analyze three cases of the schools' informal learning contexts in order to better understand how teachers learned through everyday interactions.

Within each case, the findings illuminate three facets of school culture that provide or fail to provide opportunities for teacher learning in informal contexts: school leadership, teachers' professional relationships, and their individual stances as learners.

The limitations of the paper derive from its focus on school cultures as learning organizations producing detailed thick descriptions, which are culturally specific and may not necessarily be transferable to other schools.

The implications underline that teachers and teacher educators could enhance teachers' professional learning by contributing to building and sustaining the opportunities necessary to maintain professional growth at teachers' workplaces.

The value of the paper is in: defining specific cultural features in schools that create or fail to create opportunities for teachers to learn informally; showing how teachers use these opportunities for their learning; calling for re‐evaluation of professional development systems to include informal learning as an important path for professional growth.

This paper aims to report on a study concerning a Massive Open Online Course (MOOC), designed to support Greek-language teachers in secondary-education schools in implementing collaborative writing activities with Google Docs (GDs) in their classrooms. Data recorded from a post-survey were used to investigate teachers’ views and perceptions about MOOC design features, their personal achievements and the overall outcomes for their professional work and development.

The design framework of the particular teacher professional development MOOC was determined by the connectivist principles and addressed three main dimensions of teachers’ active participation: a) individual engagement; b) peer interaction and mutual support; and c) collaborative creation of educational scenarios and artefacts. The analysis used a mixed method that combines data from teachers’ active engagement through the MOOC platform records and quantitative and qualitative data from their responses to a post-survey questionnaire.

The analysis of the research data provided supportive evidence that the design framework was effective towards promoting teachers’ active engagement, peer interaction and support and development of learning design abilities to integrate collaborative writing with GDs in their classrooms. The findings showed that the majority of participants conceptualized this MOOC as an efficient environment to enhance their pedagogical knowledge and classroom practices and to support continuous professional development.

The findings of this study may be limited by the specific sample and the context of implementation. Future research is expected to critically analyse existing results in combination with qualitative data from detailed interviews of participants in this teacher professional development MOOC.

The results provided supportive evidence that successful MOOCs for teacher professional development are determined by four key design features: a) connecting course content and teacher learning practices to the educational reality of the classroom; b) defining concrete learning objectives of the course; c) promoting teachers’ collaborative learning; and d) creating a learning community among peers.

This paper presents a systematic analysis of teachers’ engagement in a teacher professional development MOOC, designed to support collaborative and self-directed learning. The results are expected to be significant and valuable for wider educational contexts, as MOOCs for teacher professional development is a new, ambitious topic for both research and educational policies.

The purpose of this paper is to explore supportive and shared leadership structures at schools as a function of school culture policies and procedures.

A qualitative study was conducted at three secondary schools in the Midwestern USA. Administrators and teachers were interviewed, professional learning communities observed and artifacts collected to explore school culture policies, procedures and leadership in the implementation of professional learning community practice.

This study concludes that school leaders must provide supportive and shared leadership structures for teachers in order to ensure a positive school culture and effective professional learning communities that impact school improvement. Leaders in schools must work directly with teachers to create policies and procedures that provide teachers the leadership structure to directly impact school improvement through professional learning community collaborative efforts.

This study builds on the school culture and professional learning communities literature by exploring existent policies and practices in schools as unique cases. Much of the literature calls for specific case studies to identify issues in the implementation of effective practice. This study is important to the community as specific cases that may inform educational leaders on mechanisms that may be leveraged to ensure successful implementation of policies and procedures outline in school culture and professional learning community literature.

Although schools across the United States are becoming increasingly linguistically and culturally diverse, many teachers remain underprepared to work with students classified as English learners (ELs), especially at the secondary level. Acknowledging the importance of developing systems of support for teachers of ELs, this paper examines the district- and school-level factors shaping secondary teachers' access to EL-focused professional learning in one large urban school district.

To examine teachers' access to EL-focused professional learning, the authors draw on 49 in-depth interviews with district leaders and staff from nine secondary schools. Data analysis was guided by a structure, culture and agency theoretical framework.

Findings revealed that decreased structural support, in terms of both fiscal and human resources, constrained teachers' access to EL-related professional learning. Further, the district culture was characterized by limited understanding of ELs' backgrounds and assets. While some school leaders exercised agency to bolster EL-focused professional learning for teachers, such supports were rare.

Findings help to contextualize secondary teachers' feelings of unpreparedness to serve ELs, illuminating several factors that district and school leaders should attend to in order to bolster the development of professional capital for teachers of ELs at the secondary level.

While prior research outlines the importance of designing systems of support for EL-focused professional learning, this study highlights specific structural and cultural factors shaping such systems.

Researchers have provided critiques of teacher efficacy research along with suggestions for future research, but no recent reviews have examined the state of collective teacher efficacy (CTE) research as it relates specifically to professional development. This review addressed the following questions: How much research attention has been paid to professional learning and CTE? What does the research tell us about professional learning and CTE? What do we know about influencing CTE through professional learning? The paper aims to discuss these issues.

Educational Resources Information Center and EBSCO databases were searched for peer-reviewed articles written in English and published over the last ten years (between 2007 and 2017). The search terms included “collective efficacy” and “teacher or teachers” and “professional development and professional learning” and were extended beyond titles to include keywords contained within the articles. This would help to broaden the search and increase the number of hits.

There is little that can be gleaned from the research related to professional learning and the contextual factors that influence collective efficacy beliefs. Only one study (Paxon et al., 2014) in this review considered the formation of CTE in relation to both remote and proximate sources. Although some of the studies explained Bandura’s (1993) sources of CTE, reference to the sources were notably absent in the reported findings, implications, and conclusions of many of the studies. Contextual variables examined in the component studies included either implementation patterns, trust, sense of belonging, teacher uncertainty, opportunities for teacher leadership, social relationships, and/or labels assigned to low performing districts and/or high performing districts.

A limitation that influences the findings of this review is that the review was not exhaustive, and articles written in English with the search terms outlined did not capture the population of possible articles. Future reviewers may uncover new patterns in CTE research by searching non-English journals and by examining the range of work completed in graduate theses and dissertations.

In regard to promising professional learning designs, inquiry based approaches, including collaborative action research, problem-solving groups, and teams’ monitoring and tracking individual student progress seemed to hold promise. In each of these designs, educators collaboratively analyze student evidence for the purpose of evaluating their impact, reflecting on their collective work, and determining optimal next steps. Interpreting results by examining student learning data might help to strengthen connections between perceived levels of difficulty related to teaching tasks and perceptions of group competence. When conversations shift from generalized talk about student’s progress and polite sharing of teaching strategies to more in-depth conversations about the connections between the two, professional learning becomes more impactful. The interpretation of results, leads to shifts in causal attributions – from assumptions which included “I planned and taught the lesson, but they didn’t get it” to “you haven’t taught it until they’ve learned” as a result of engaging in these types of professional learning designs.

Hattie’s (2015) research, which synthesized major findings from over 1,200 meta-analyses relating to influences on student achievement, demonstrated the magnitude and overall distribution of more than 150,000 effect sizes. In a recent update, Hattie (2016) ranked CTE as the number one influence of all the factors related to student achievement, reporting an effect size of 1.57.This update was based on Eells’ (2011) meta-analysis that synthesized correlational evidence for CTE and student achievement. Eells (2011) found that CTE was strongly and positively associated with student achievement “across subject areas, when using varied instruments, and in multiple locations” (p. 110). Eells (2011) finding is becoming more widely disseminated through the promotion of Hattie’s (2016) Visible Learning Research due to its prominent position within that body of evidence. Thus, the interest of practitioners in the field, including administrators, teachers, and professional learning facilitators has been piqued. Gaining a better understanding of CTE, sources that shape it, and its antecedents and consequences are likely to surface as a major upcoming focus for designers and facilitators of professional learning. There is a small amount of extant research that examined professional development effects on teacher efficacy (Tschannen-Moran and McMaster, 2009; Ross and Bruce, 2007). However, there are many voids in the collective efficacy research. Given this void and the increased interest to gain a better understanding of CTE on part of practitioners, not only is additional research needed, it is imperative to find ways to address the ongoing dilemma of making research and theory relevant to educators’ practice.

This study aims to investigate the relationship between leadership and teacher professional learning considering two mediating variables – teacher trust and teacher agency.

The study utilized structural equation modeling in analyzing the responses from 1,654 secondary public teachers from 43 schools in the Philippines.

Leadership does not have a direct relationship with teacher professional learning. The established relationship of leadership and professional learning from literature exists through the mediation of teacher trust and teacher agency.

The results point out that school leaders must affect teacher trust and teacher agency to influence the engagement of teachers to professional learning. Contrary to what has been accepted in educational management that leaders can directly impact teachers, the findings of this study dictate that the full effects of leadership are coursed through mediating pathways.

The purpose of this paper is to provide an overview of a commissioned research study that analyzed a schooling initiative with the ambitious goal of transforming learning environments across the district by advancing innovative, inquiry-driven pedagogical practices combined with 1:1 iPad distribution. The paper explores impacts of the initiative on pedagogical innovation, twenty-first century learning, and related impacts on professional learning, collaboration, and culture change in the pilot schools analyzed in the study.

A multi-dimensional case study approach was used to analyze how the initiative was implemented, and to what extent teaching, learning, and professional cultures were transformed, based on action plan inputs and “change drivers”. Research methods included structured, open-ended interviews conducted with randomly selected teachers and key informants in leadership roles, focus groups held with students, as well as analysis of policy documents, student work samples, and other data sources.

The authors found evidence of a synergistic relationship between innovations in inquiry-driven pedagogy and professional learning cultures, with evidence of increased collaboration, deepened engagement and persistence, and a climate of collegiality and risk-taking at both classroom and organizational levels. Based on initiative inputs, the authors found that innovations in collaborative technology/pedagogy practices in classrooms paralleled similar innovations and transformations in professional learning cultures and capacity-building networks.

This initiative analyzed in this paper provides a case study in large-scale system change, offering a compelling model for transformative policies and initiatives where interwoven innovations in pedagogy and technology mobilization are supported by multiple drivers for formal and informal professional learning/development and networked collaboration. Challenges and recommendations are highlighted in the concluding discussion.

The transformative initiative analyzed in this paper provides a very timely case-model for innovations in twenty-first century learning and, specifically, for enacting and sustaining large-scale system change where inquiry-driven learning and technology tools are being mobilized to support “deep learning”, “new learning partnerships”, and multilevel transformations in professional learning (Fullan and Donnelly, 2013). This research advances scholarly work in the areas of twenty-first century learning, identifying relationships between technology/pedagogy innovation and professional capital building (Hargreaves and Fullan, 2012).

Research on school leadership has confirmed that principals influence teacher and student learning by building an “academic-focused ethos” in their schools. In this study, our objective was to examine if and how the learning-centered leadership of principals influenced academic optimism of teachers and the resulting effects on their engagement in professional learning. More specifically, we examined this hypothesized set of leadership effects among teachers and principals in high schools located in Thailand.

The study was conducted with 1,763 teachers and 152 principals from 159 randomly selected, medium size secondary schools located in Thailand. The research employed multi-level structural equation modeling and bootstrapping analyses in order to test and explore these relationships in a mediation model of school leadership effects on teacher professional learning through academic optimism.

Results of this study reinforce prior research which has found that principal leadership can have significant direct and indirect effects on the professional learning of teachers. This finding is important because, as elaborated earlier, scholars believe that teacher professional learning is a key to sustainable improvement in schools. More specifically, our results extend prior research in two ways. First, as the first study to link Learning-Centered Leadership with Academic Optimism, this study extends findings that point to the role of school leadership in sustaining a culture of academic optimism in schools. Second, this study also established Academic Optimism as a mediator through which school leadership supports Teacher Professional Learning.

Although our results support a positive conclusion concerning the effects of school leadership and academic optimism on teacher learning, this was a cross-sectional study. Therefore, caution must be exercised before drawing causal attributions. For example, research has also found that teachers who work in schools that evidence features of a professional learning community are more likely to have a greater sense of collective teacher efficacy, a variable that is also associated with Academic Optimism. Therefore, although our study proposed Academic Optimism as the mediator and teacher professional learning as the dependent variable, it is also possible that this relationship could be reversed or reciprocal (i.e. mutually reinforcing). Future research should continue to examine these possibilities using longitudinal and/or experimental research designs that enable clearer delineation of causal relationships. We also suggest the utility of qualitative and mixed methods studies capable of exploring in greater depth the mechanisms through which school leadership contributes to productive teacher learning.

There is a need in Thailand, and elsewhere, to redefine the formal roles and professional standards of school leaders to include learning-centered practices. These standards should be embedded into the redesign of pre-service and in-service education programs for teachers and principals. We believe that, at present, relatively few school leaders in Thailand genuinely understand the meaningful impact they can have on teacher learning, and by extension, on student learning. Thus, there is a need for systemic change that recasts the nature of leadership expected from principals as well as the level of lifelong learning expected of teachers.

The findings from this research contribute to an evolving knowledge base on how school leaders influence teacher learning in different national contexts. The research also extends prior research by exploring the role of academic optimism as a mediator of school leadership effects on teacher learning.

The importance of early and developmentally appropriate science education is increasingly recognized. Consequently, creation of common guidelines and standards in early childhood science education has begun (National Research Council (NRC), 2012), and researchers, practitioners, and policy makers have shown great interest in aligning professional development with the new guidelines and standards. There are some important issues that need to be addressed in order to successfully implement guidelines and make progress toward accomplishing standards. Early childhood teachers have expressed a lack of confidence in teaching science and nature (Torquati, Cutler, Gilkerson, & Sarver, in press) and have limited science and pedagogical content knowledge (PCK) (Appleton, 2008). These are critical issues because teachers’ subject-matter knowledge is a robust predictor of student learning outcomes (Enfield & Rogers, 2009; Kennedy, 1998; Wilson, Floden, & Ferrini-Mundy, 2002) and is seen as a critical step toward improving K-12 student achievement (National Commission on Mathematics and Science Teaching for the 21st Century (NCMST), 2000; NRC, 2000). We argue that the same is true of preschool teachers.

This chapter discusses: (a) theories and practices in early childhood science education (i.e., preschool through 3rd grade) in relation to teaching for conceptual change, (b) research on methods of professional development in early childhood science education, and (c) innovative approaches to integrating scientific practices, crosscutting concepts, and disciplinary core ideas with early childhood professional development.