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 a recent publication, Senge ("All systems go: the change imperative for whole system reform." Corwin Press, Thousand Oaks, 2010, x) stated "at no time in history has there been a more powerful need for a new vision of the purpose of education." Increasingly citizens, academics and practitioners are calling for radical changes to educational…

This paper documents the initial process by which a San Diego middle school, located in a low-income and predominantly Hispanic neighborhood and repeatedly failing to meet No Child Left Behind provisions, restructured into an academically rigorous, detracked charter school. The discussion of the political experience and working relationships…

Educational change is a fact of life for teachers across the world, as schools are subjected to constant and ubiquitous pressures to innovate. And, yet, many school practices remain remarkably persistent in the face of such innovation. This paradox of innovation without change is perplexing for policymakers and practitioners alike. This paper…

Different forms of accountability are part of educational restructuring across Europe. This article will focus on the different national configurations of accountability from teachers' point of view. A comparative perspective will enlarge on commonalities and differences between teachers' experiences in Spain, Portugal, Ireland, England, Sweden,…

Schools in England have been required to adopt and adapt an ongoing series of policy initiatives: some however are offered on an "opt-in" basis. This paper examines one such "offer," that of Creative Partnerships, a programme which provides schools in designated deprived areas the opportunity to work with creative practitioners in order to change…

The sustainability of research-based innovations in schools is constrained not only by systemic institutional barriers and inherent contradictions between schooling and research, but also by the related issue of time. This case study suggests that relative timescales, e.g., the collective activity of schooling over decades versus the individual…

This article racializes educational change by examining literature on the history of educational approaches to diversity in the United States and Ontario, Canada to demonstrate how their respective national myths for engaging with diversity--the melting pot and mosaic--have impacted their educational policies and practices over three definable…