Teacher professional development has been identified as essential to educational reform. Moreover, research suggests the power of inquiry communities in spurring teacher professional learning and shifts in classroom practice. However, not enough is known about what conditions within a community of inquiry might be necessary to inspire, support,…

Intermediary organizations' coaches are utilized to support and develop principals and teachers as they seek to bring about substantive school improvement. This study presents a qualitative case study of one coach engaged as an intermediary of a school reform organization, the Together Initiative (TI). To investigate how this coach enacted TI…

This paper has three key aims. First it examines the authors' attempts to use knowledge creation activity as a way of developing evidence informed practice amongst a learning community of 36 early years practitioners in the London Borough of Camden. Second, it seeks to illustrate how the authors approached the idea of measuring evidence use…

Studies on educational change efforts abound but generally limit themselves to post hoc explanations of failure and success. Such explanations are rarely turned into attempts at providing models for predicting change outcomes. The present study tries to develop such a model based on the teachers' impact analysis of a management-driven…

In Germany, it can be observed that schools increasingly take advantage of experts from the outside in their further pedagogical and organizational development. Regarding their profession and the area of content to which they are assigned, these experts represent a heterogeneous group. This contribution assumes that several patterns can be…

While educational theory has often seen collaboration and competition as incompatible, there is increasing evidence that collaboration persists in educational markets characterized by competition. In this paper, we use the theoretical lens of "coopetition", a relationship between organizations involving competition in some segments and…

This paper reports the results of an 18-month integrated, problem-solving research study of one new school's efforts to create a K-12 system of student assessment data that reflects their innovative vision for personalized and student-centered instruction. Based on interview, observational, and documentary data, the authors report how…

The prevalence of charter management organizations (CMOs)--networks of charter schools overseen by a home office--has exploded in recent years but there is a paucity of research into how CMOs approach growth and the factors that influence their growth plans. In this qualitative study, we examine how a set of 25 older, more established CMOs…

This article explores how comprehensive school teachers' sense of professional agency changes in the context of large-scale national educational change in Finland. We analysed the premises on which teachers (n = 100) view themselves and their work in terms of developing their own school, catalysed by the large-scale national change. The study…

Educational reform is rarely considered from the point of view of conceptual change. Typically, reform starts at the policy document level by introducing criteria intended to lead to the adoption of new practices. This study offers a case study of how legal national educational reforms can be localized. The case in focus is the recent legislative…

This study investigated why and how principals selected members for their instructional leadership team (ILT) and how this selection criteria and process may have impacted team members' understandings of, and behaviors on, the team. Qualitative methods, specifically interviews and observations, were used to explore team members'…

This article targets local school improvement in Sweden and temporary systems as a model to organize improvement work. These data are based on a qualitative case study of teacher groups constituting a temporary system representing the different subjects in comprehensive school in a medium-sized urban municipality. A total of eight interviews were…

The phenomenon of teachers taking on leadership tasks beyond their classroom duties has become widespread internationally. While presented as a catalyst for educational improvement, it blurs the traditional division between teaching and leading and therefore challenges the conventional professional relationships in schools as well as the…

Research and policy have increasingly focused on the importance of staffing schools with effective teachers. A critical variable affecting teacher effectiveness is the enthusiasm, energy and effort teachers bring to their work, or teachers' work engagement. Better understanding teachers' work engagement and how it may change over stages…

Although the school constitutes a key cultural arena for the production and reproduction of gender identities, few studies have addressed gender discourse in educational institutions in developing societies. Such studies are especially sparse in Arab society in Israel. This study goes some way to addressing what is often absent from many…