This article is based on the experience gained with an online learning community developed as part of a pilot project that followed a national research study of in-service career and technical education (CTE) administrators and teachers. The authors summarize the most salient points when designing a learning community website, the following features need to be in place to promote interaction: clarify the goals of the website, its function and limitations; ensure privacy from the outside and a psychologically safe environment; ensure that community members understand the features of the website; structure authentic learning tasks, dialog, and posting activity to match the goals of the course; a facilitator or moderator should encourage and reinforce the initial postings, especially from novices; encourage threaded discussion groups to form according to problem topic or academic area; and activities will need to have time limits.

This article describes a project that sought to provide meaningful remote early field experiences for teacher candidates enrolled in distance teacher education courses. The focus of this study was to examine how candidates experienced the online field component, which was consistently structured for both methods courses. The findings reveal that a multitude of themes emerged: shared viewing that enhanced field experiences by making them more meaningful and relevant, created opportunities for social learning and reflection, and served as a bridge between classroom learning and experiences in the field. The authors argue that collaboration may be the key to survival in an age where economic conditions find teachers competing for positions and evaluated based on their ability to function as a leader within professional learning communities.

To evaluate the impact of the emergent national teacher performance assessment (TPA) on student teachers (STs), this study examined a pilot implementation at one university in Washington State during Spring 2011. The findings reveal that there are some potential benefits to the TPA that may positively affect student and teacher learning. The finding show that STs report greater levels of reflection enabling them to better focus on student thinking. Similarly, university supervisors see the TPA as an opportunity to shift the analysis of teaching episodes to the ST, thereby developing more complex pedagogical thinking in teacher candidates.

In this article, the author explores the role of the arts in education through the lens of current research in cognitive neuroscience. The article explains that although arts education has largely used multiple intelligences theory to substantiate its presence in classrooms and schools, this relationship has ultimately hindered the field of arts education's understanding of the relationship between the arts, human development, and learning. The author argues that as we strive toward the new theory of whole-mindedness, learners can be freed from their labeling - and so can the arts in education. The arts not only represent a wide spectrum of crafts and domains valued by society in so many ways, but also represent core modalities that align with cognitive constructs in the mind-brain - constructs that are critical to our development as individuals and to a society that has entered a visual revolution.

This article explores teachers’ perspectives on enacting environmental education (EE) in a multicultural context. In understanding teacher strategies in adapting EE to a multicultural context and teacher views on the obstacles encountered, the authors found that teacher strategies reflected aspects of progressive EE in extending beyond simple knowledge-awareness to emphasizing changes in behavior and nurturing of ownership. The findings revealed that challenges included value clashes, a lack of common lived experiences, and reconciling contradictory educational perspectives and political policies, which often placed teachers in paradoxical positions. The findings suggest moving toward practices of culturally-responsive environmental education (CrEE) that demand more than awareness but include interactive dialogue.