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To describe the role of teaching “the paragraph” in furthering literacy goals. The study considers one concept, the Claim-Support-Conclusion Paragraph (CSC) as a curricular and pedagogic intervention supporting writing and academic success for the marginalized students in two classrooms.

While this study corresponds to a gap in the literature of writing instruction (and paragraphing), it takes as its model the development of comprehensive collaborations where researcher-scholars embed themselves in the real practices of school classrooms. A fully-fledged partnership between researcher, practitioners, is characteristic of “practice embedded educational research,” or PEER (Snow, 2015), with analysis of data following qualitative and case study methodology.

Practice-embedded research in this partnership consistently revealed several important themes, including the effective use of the CSC paragraph functions as a critical common denominator across rich curricular choices. Extensive use of writing practice drives increased literacy fluency for struggling students, and writing practice can be highly integrated with reading practice. Effective writing instruction likely includes analytic and interpretive purposes, as well as personal, aesthetic writing, and teaching good paragraphing is intertwined with all of these genres in a community that values writing routines.

Greater academic success for the marginalized students in their classroom necessitates the use of a variety of scaffolds, and writing instruction can include the CSC paragraph as a means to develop academic literacies, including argumentation. Collaborative and innovative work with curriculum within a PEER model may have affordances for developing practitioner and researcher knowledge about writing instruction.

Purpose – This chapter explores the work of one expert seventh-grade science teacher, Ann, as she used the gradual release of responsibility (GRR) to develop students’ knowledge and use of science language and conceptual knowledge. Ann’s use of scaffolds such as thoughtful definition, classroom discussion, and writing frameworks is explored, as well as her methods of incorporating language into science inquiry, and the evidence she gathered as proof of learning. Her instructional decision-making and specific instructional actions are analyzed to describe the ways she gradually guided students from heavily scaffolded learning opportunities, through guided practice with extensive modeling, and ultimately to independent and accurate use of science language and conceptual knowledge in spoken and written discourse.

Design/methodology/approach – In a researcher/teacher partnership modeled on the practice embedded educational research (PEER) framework (Snow, 2015) the author worked with Ann over four school years, collecting data that included interviews, Ann’s teaching journal, student artifacts, and vocabulary pre/post-assessments. The initial task of the partnership was review of science standards and curricular documents and analysis of disciplinary language in seventh-grade science in order to construct a classroom science vocabulary assessment that incorporated a scaffolded format to build incremental knowledge of science words. Results of 126 students’ pre/post scores on the vocabulary assessment were analyzed using quantitative methods, and interviews and the teaching journal were analyzed using qualitative techniques. Student artifacts support and triangulate the quantitative and qualitative analyses.

Findings – Analysis of students’ pre/post-scores on the vocabulary assessment supported the incremental nature of vocabulary learning and the value of a scaffolded assessment. Improvement in ability to choose a one-word definition and choose a sentence-length definition had significant and positive effect on students’ ability to write a sentence using a focus science word correctly to demonstrate science conceptual knowledge. Female students performed just as well as male students: a finding that differs from other vocabulary intervention research. Additionally, Ann’s use of scaffolded, collaborative methods during classroom discussion and writing led to improved student knowledge of science language and the concepts it labels, as evident in students’ responses during discussion and their writing in science inquiry reports and science journals.

Research limitations – These data were collected from students in one science teacher’s classroom, limiting generalization. However, the expertise of this teacher renders her judgments useful to other teachers and teacher trainers, despite the limited context of this research.

Practical implications – Science knowledge is enhanced when language and science inquiry coexist, but the language of science often presents a barrier to learning science, and there are significant student achievement gaps in science learning across race, ethnicity, and gender. Researchers have described ways to make explicit connections between science language, concepts, and knowledge, transcending the gaps and leveling the playing field for all students. Analysis of Ann’s teaching practice, drawn from four years of teacher and student data, provides specific and practical ways of doing this in a real science classroom. Scaffolding, modeling, and co-construction of learning are key.

Originality/value of paper – This chapter details the methods one expert teacher used to make her own learning the object of inquiry, simultaneously developing the insights and the strategies she needed to mentor students. It describes how Ann infused the GRR into planning and instruction to create learning experiences that insured student success, even if only at incremental levels. Ann’s methods can thus become a model for other teachers who wish to enhance their students’ learning of science language and concepts through infusion of literacy activity.

The urgency of improving the schools call for a distributed instructional leadership model where teachers are not just recipients of professional development, but also active leaders who are coaches and mentors for their peers. The purpose of this paper is to examine the teacher leadership development system in Shanghai, and identify pathways to constructing actionable models that develop and maximize instructional expertise.

This is a qualitative study. Purposive sampling was conducted to select four teaching-study groups from a frame that included all certified “expert teachers” from a large Shanghai district with about 9,000 teachers. Grounded theory approaches were used to understand “what actually happens in the teachers’ world.” Participative observations (of lesson delivering and collaborative decoding), semi-structured interviews, teachers’ reflective journal entries, and video recording of group work and lessons were the main measures of data collection.

Three key features of expertise infusion were identified: recognizing, differentiating, and labeling teacher expertise at multiple mastery levels; providing expert teachers with support and leadership responsibilities to lead practice-embedded and cross-school peer learning; and creating a roadmap for teachers to chart continuous learning pathways individually and build an enhanced content pedagogical knowledgebase collectively.

Results from this study provide the impetus for further exploration in how Shanghai continuously share and improve good teaching systemically, which could be informative to US schools and districts in their effort of redesigning professional development that maximizes available expertise among teachers and stimulates teacher-led action research for student learning.

The purpose of this paper is to present one approach to the measurement of impact in a professional doctorate in education that encompasses discipline-based coursework and practice-embedded research.

Quantitative and qualitative data on the impact of the doctoral program were collected at regular intervals, with a focus on students’ application of program content in their professional practice and on students’ professional growth.

The research design and the findings are discussed in the context of the larger debate surrounding the measurement of doctoral impact and the value of online doctoral degrees for practitioners.

This paper presents the systematic collection of data over four years in a newly developed professional doctorate in education.

To explore annotated video-based portfolios and the communicative practices embedded in this technological mediation as a means for teacher candidates to construct pedagogical knowledge and develop self-examination skills leading to a deeper reflection on practice, greater perceived value of the reflection process, and the ability to identify specific behaviors for improvement.

In this chapter, we present the development of an online graduate practicum course in a Masters in Reading program, and the supportive measures put into place so students could reflect on their own and others’ practice within a video-based portfolio construction.

Observations indicate course members’ discussion regarding teaching follows a clear progression: the importance of teachers’ management of materials, space and time; developing their ability to discern patterns in student behavior; and a growing recognition of the impact teacher talk and habits have on their students. To support practicum students’ progress, we have developed a set of assumptions to guide talk about practice during annotation and discussion of video, as well as ways of using talk effectively during a video lesson.

We share this glimpse into the design of our practicum course as a means to make transparent the support systems developed so students could capture and discuss quality practice within the context of their own work with a student. We hope sharing our journey will provide others engaged in this work with a common language and lens for discussion about quality, resulting in positive outcomes for students.

In the 21st century, placing higher education institutions in the global world has become the norm. Therefore, many higher education institutions in Ghana and across the globe have set out to internationalise or become world-class universities as part of their strategic ambitions. Thus, finding ways to become visible on a global scale and transcend beyond the countries in which they operate has become of major interest to most universities. The authors of this chapter were curious to determine how universities adopt imported organisational templates as a strategic ambition. One should not assume that the semblance of such imported concepts is mere institutional isomorphism stemming from internationalisation and globalisation. The study employed semi-structured interviews and institutional documents as data collection tools among ten (10) university actors in a flagship university in Ghana. The study used postcolonial theory to critically examine the drivers and current practices embedded in dominant hegemonic global discourses, such as internationalisation. The findings revealed that the drivers and reforms underpinning university internationalisation ambition are framed within economic rationalities, producing human capital, self-marketisation to promote visibility, and a quest for global competition couched within global neoliberal ideology. The study recommends the need for university actors to (re)focus and (re)evaluate university internationalisation discourse to ensure a balance between local relevance and global forces.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the formative potential of the case method on MBA students’ “civility” – the procedural dimension of the ethics field. While a robust literature has focussed on the impact of teaching ethics (content) on students’ behavior, to-date no study has explored the link between the pedagogy used (method) and students behavioral dispositions.

A thorough theory review was conducted, covering the different pedagogy literatures that frame the discussion on the link between learning methods and ethics in general, and civic-minded behavior in particular. Drawing on relevant findings from these literatures, some implications are drawn, and tentative propositions are laid out.

The study seeks to readdress the existing imbalance between the cognitive and the formative aspects of education, placing emphasis on the latter. The paper proposes that, other things being equal, MBA programs that make intensive and systematic use of the case method will foster civility among students. Through the iterative practices embedded in the case method, students internalize a number of behavioral predispositions that form the basis of civic behavior.

This paper calls for an approach in managerial education that goes beyond the transmission of knowledge. In particular, the paper emphasize the importance of seeing the MBA as “little schools of democracy,” where civic-oriented inclinations can take root in future business leaders. This finding carries substantial implications for business schools and professors, in Latin America and beyond.

The transmission of technical knowledge has traditionally been considered the backbone of managerial education – a purely cognitive process. This paper, on the other hand, seeks to highlight the transformative potential of the MBA through the use of the appropriate learning methodologies - the case method in particular. By focussing on the concept of civility, the paper seek to go beyond the prevailing focus on content among ethics scholars and highlight the relevance of habits as a necessary first step on the shaping of civic-minded business leaders. This paper adds a much needed missing link between learning methods and civic behavior.

The purpose of this paper is to describe how dominant social practices embedded in situated report‐writing activities in an automotive discourse community in South Africa causally shape component engineers' perceptions of literacy. The study explores how the dominant practices of supervisor feedback and report acceptance causally impact on effective report‐writing perceptions during report text production.

Critical ethnography is the preferred methodology as it explores cultural orientations of local practice contexts and incorporates multiple understandings to provide a holistic understanding of the complexity of writing practices. This study focuses on data collected during two interviews and a focus group discussion with four L2 component engineers as well as the questionnaires their two L1 supervisors completed.

The engineers tended to measure or associate literacy and effective writing standards with supervisor feedback practices. These feedback practices interacted causally with the meanings or associations, the participants gave to or associated with literacy and their report‐writing competency. As a consequence, literacy was often described in terms of correct wording or terminology, grammatical correctness, spelling, sentence structures or styles in reports as determined by their supervisors during feedback practices, rather than report content, structure or technical details.

The participants constructed literacy in terms of correct language, word and spelling use and focused on linguistic errors in their report writing. They tended to perceive rhetoric and engineering discourse as separate entities rather than rhetorically constructed contextual knowledge. Language problems were usually attributed to human being inefficiencies and L1 standards rather than the individual creation of knowledge.

This paper not only impacts causally on engineering workplace writing practices but on higher education and future report‐writing practices. Digital technologies and systems will increasingly impact on report‐writing practices, what constitutes contextual knowledge and acceptable literacies as varied and different audiences define acceptable writing practices.

The paper shows that on‐the‐job writing research is limited and research that has been done often focuses on criteria for good writing as defined by experts in the field. If all workplace writing‐practice research adopts this expert view, it offers no insight and understanding into what implicitly and explicitly guides writers. Writing‐practice research also needs to focus on the voices of writers so that the influence of human social behaviour on these practices can be understood.

This study aimed at exploring mathematics teachers’ reactions, learning, school leaders’ support, and the use of the lesson study for transformative assessment (LSforTA) program ideas in practice.

The LSforTA program was new and therefore, a local and grounded approach was needed to examine teachers’ knowledge and their skills acquired using LSforTA. A design-based research approach was therefore selected to evaluate and refine the LSforTA approach.

The program affected teachers’ practices of transformative assessment and enhanced their knowledge and skills in assessing students transformatively in a positive way. The paper concludes how LSforTA procedures were adapted in response to this evaluation and provides suggestions for future development and research.

With its original combination of conceptual and theoretical lenses, the research contributes to the academic literature by linking transformative assessment, lesson study and school context. This connection provides new opportunities for teachers to develop strategies to create meaningful assessment practices embedded with their instructional process in the context of their schools.