This paper describes the educational knowledge domain as having a community structure (form) based in relations of production (authoring) and consumption (referencing), and a cognitive structure (content) based in relations of ideas and concepts. We propose developing an online interactive system whereby the vast array of available knowledge artifacts can be mined for information reflective of these networks, and which can be visualized, measured, and explored over time. Building on the ideas of online communities, network visualizations, e-commerce, and advanced search engines, Scholar Practitioner Information Networks for Education (SPINE) not only facilitates access to education information resources, but also allows the community to view multiple sources of information in a relational context.

This study investigates how people are prepared for professional practice in the clergy, teaching, and clinical psychology.

This study compares the academic achievement of education management organization-managed charter schools to other charter schools and traditional public schools in Arizona using student-level test scores to conduct separate analyses for basic skills and complex thinking skills in reading and mathematics.

This study examines the Asian–White achievement gap at various quantiles of the reading and mathematics achievement distributions. Results indicate that Asian students outperformed their White peers in mathematics across the entire range of the distribution and over time, whereas high-achieving Asian students outperformed their White peers in reading in the 1990s.

In this case study, the knowledge-building community (KBC) model was adopted for the professional development of 7 Singaporean teachers. The teachers’ patterns of online interactions were analyzed using social network analysis and the interaction analysis model. The findings indicate that the teachers formed a socially cohesive community and participated rather actively, with a healthy distribution of online posts at various phases of knowledge construction.

This study examines how a group of fifth graders and their teacher created and navigated an epistemological pathway as they explored their ideas about the meaning(s) of freedom. Findings from this study show how dialogic literature discussions can help us see children and teachers as intimately involved in the exploration and coconstruction of knowledge and ways of knowing fundamental to developing an informed, critical citizenry.

The purpose of our study was to investigate teacher talk during shared planning time to provide insight into the rationales behind teachers’ decision making that may be related to their underlying beliefs about subject matter, teaching, learning, and their students. This study supported our hypothesis that teachers’ collaborative planning time discourse provides a unique lens for understanding teachers’ beliefs.

In this article, we argue that schooling and school reform in the 21st century continues to be approached as if it were a flatworm capable of replicating itself. These reform efforts in today’s No Child Left Behind environment reify static ideas about schooling, resulting in organizational entropy. Instead, we present the process of Indigenous Invention as one that holds promise in moving our schools from entropy to renewal. Indigenous Invention grows from new conceptions of learning, cognition, and development, and our work in schools and communities during the past 16 years. We end with a discussion of the crucial values, dispositions, and conditions that have been identified for promoting Indigenous Invention. Indigenous Invention provides educators opportunities to imagine and invent new practices and schools called for in this “flat world.”

This article explores a policy intended to improve the quality of teaching by improving the quality of teacher evaluation. It examines a Peer Assistance and Review (PAR) program, and specifically one aspect of the program—its oversight panel—asking how an oversight panel alters the practice of teacher evaluation. The core argument of the article is that oversight panels have the potential to fundamentally alter the transparency of the teacher evaluation process and, in turn, the nature of accountability.

Analyzing the discourse of eighth-grade graduates from an innovative elementary school as they transition to conventional high schools revealed distinct response patterns characterizing concurrent projects of self-actualization and institutional achievement. Our analysis suggests that a certain critical ambivalence toward credentialism and competition can be part of a healthy strategy for school success, particularly for those from marginalized groups who do not wholly buy into the (predominantly White and middle-class) historically rooted traditions of conventional schooling.

The article draws on data from an ethnographic study of children’s writing in a test-monitored, basics-focused urban elementary school. Showcasing the writing of first grader Tionna, a talkative African American Language speaker and the most prolific writer in her class, and her teachers’ responses to her productions, the article analyzes the communicative disconnects that arise when teachers urge children to listen to their voices in composing written messages.

We explore how political master narratives impact the production of local narratives in the context of adult literacy education. Using Burke’s pentad to analyze adult literacy success stories from 1978 to 2005, we show how the shift from a liberal to a conservative political master narrative is reflected in the stories as a change of agency from the program to the individual learner, a shift that serves to undermine the purpose of the stories themselves. We argue for the creation of a counternarrative that will better serve the interests of adult literacy students by emphasizing the broader scene in which they labor—stories that foreground the structural and cultural contexts that constrain and limit possibilities for human growth.

This article explores how two groups of new urban teachers experienced the inquiry-based programs of support in which they participated as silencing and uncritical. It offers a distinction between the practices of false inquiry and dialectic inquiry in structures designed to support new teachers.

This article analyzes the classroom instruction of an experienced teacher in an elementary school where the principal resisted a movement toward standardization and supported teachers’ autonomy and authority over curriculum and instruction amid high-stakes state-level testing in language arts and mathematics. Examining the teacher’s instructional practice in social studies, a subject not included in state testing but nevertheless impacted by state testing, we demonstrate how specific teaching dilemmas that arose in response to state testing led to a new type of professional practice that we call constrained professionalism.

In spite of increasing demands for school districts to use evidence in their decision making, there are few empirical studies of evidence use at the district level. This article presents findings from a longitudinal study of the role of evidence in instructional decision making in one urban district.

This article presents a three-dimensional typology designed to organize and analyze the array of teacher policies across education systems. We developed the typology using data from a national scan of teacher policy, and we tested and refined this tool using data from multilevel, nested case studies of teacher policy in three states: Maryland, New York, and Connecticut.

Using multiple data sets and structural equation modeling, this work finds that professional development has moderate effects on teacher practice and very small but sometimes significant effects on student achievement when the effects of professional development are mediated by teacher practice. In spite of differences in samples, academic subjects, and assessments, the effects of professional development on teacher practice and student achievement persist and are remarkably similar across analyses.

This article provides a critical analysis of the way that race has been addressed in extant mathematics education research, policy, and practice.

This article explores sustainability as an emerging paradigm for preservice preparation of teachers.

This article describes how the organization of student councils varies across the nation by socioeconomic levels of student populations and by school charters. The authors find systematic disparities in the quality of student governments that possibly shape youths’ future attitudes about representative government.

This article explores how social network analysis can help researchers studying teachers’ professional interactions understand the internal structure of teacher communities and assess teachers’ social capital for implementing ambitious reforms. Case study data from two schools in California illustrate how network data complement interview data to help explain the success or failure of reforms to take hold in schools.

This article makes a comparison between culturally responsive teaching and differentiated instruction, attempting to reconcile seemingly disparate emergent research-based teaching practices. Case study classroom scenarios are presented to provide examples of combined applications of both approaches.