When graduate students enter special education programs, they arrive with dispositional knowledge that can assist or hinder them in their professional development. Over the course of two years, the researchers assessed the dispositions of beginning teachers in a special education program at a west coast state university in order to better understand and enhance the teacher education process. The results of this study describe how students entered the program with a variety of perceptions and attitudes and how course work and clinical experiences in these programs affected students' attitudes, as instructors began building on students' prior experience and knowledge.

Policy makers are concerned about teacher shortages and the high rate of attrition among new teachers. Mentor-based induction has been shown to reduce the numbers of new teachers leaving schools or the profession. However, staying in the profession does not mean that new teachers are effective in helping students learn. The purpose of the project was to study how variations in new teacher support programs are related to changes in student achievement.

This study builds upon research on teacher professional communities and high school restructuring reforms. It employs a conceptual framework that draws upon theories of “community of practice” and “community of learners.” The study analyzes how teachers’ professional inquiry communities at the high school level constitute a resource for school reform and instructional improvement. The findings demonstrate how the enactment of design choices holds particular consequences for the nature and quality of teacher learning and school improvement.

The authors conducted this year-long self-study to answer the question: What could the college’s education program do to improve preparation for teaching in inner-city schools? Through their year-long collaboration in a middle-school writing classroom in an inner-city charter school, the authors examined what a prospective teacher learned in his education program that helped and hindered him. Then, they explored how the successful approaches he developed as a new teacher could be incorporated into the college’s preservice program.

In light of the consistent underperformance of the comprehensive high school, districts across the country, mostly urban, have begun creating small schools, believing that they may offer a more personalized, supportive, and demanding learning environment.The article draws on fundamental features of complexity theory (e.g., initial conditions, distributed authority, control parameters, fractals, and synergy) as a way to assess both the problems and promise of small-school reform.

This article reports a self-study conducted during the author's four-year tenure as head of the elementary school department within a college of education. During that period, she explored her developing understanding of the role of relationships in the processes of her professional and personal growth. The author describes the three cycles of action that comprise the process of change she instigated in the department. She also describes the three phases she identified retrospectively.

The present study reviews prior studies on educational blogs and traditional computer-mediated communication (CMC) applications and analyzes the benefits of educational blogs over traditional CMC tools. It develops a model for the use of blogs in educational contexts by taking into account socio-technical systems theory. The model contributes to interactivity, an open system, a visualization tool, and a decentralized environment of online communication circumstance.