The organisational culture at New Zealand's Otago Polytechnic has been shifting as a result of the "Designing for Learner Success" initiative, which focuses on the redesign and redevelopment of all vocational and degree programmes to improve learner success. The four-phase process (Preparation--Design--Development--Delivery) follows…

Research, such as that collated as part of the New Zealand Ministry of Education's (MoE) Iterative Best Evidence Synthesis (BES), indicates that regular Professional Learning and Development (PLD) for educators can have a positive effect on the quality of teaching and, in turn, on outcomes for diverse students. PLD, though, needs to offer…

Innovation may best be considered as reinvention rather than invention. This observation is supported by a gradually accelerating change in "how" professional learning and development (PLD) for education practitioners and leaders is being offered, designed, facilitated, and evaluated. The reinvention of PLD includes shifts towards…

Learning provision, including professional learning, needs to embrace mobility (of knowledge, cultures and contexts--physical and cerebral) to enable education practitioners to interact locally and globally, engage with new literacies, access rich contexts, and to question, co-construct and collaborate. Virtual mentoring, also known as distance,…

This paper presents the longitudinal learning journey of two educators who participated in the Virtual Professional Learning and Development programme (VPLD) between 2010 and 2013. Each participant's story of change describes the process and outcomes of their involvement in a future-focused environment of virtual mentorship supported by a tailored…

Professional learning communities are receiving increasing attention within the schooling sector but empirical research into their development and use within early childhood education contexts is rare. This paper reports initial findings of an exploratory study into the development of professional learning communities in New Zealand's early…

This paper explores features of successful inclusion through examples found in the literature. Schools have been given the imperative to become more inclusive through various government pronouncements and initiatives, but guidance in achieving that goal has been arguably wanting. School communities that have demonstrated more inclusive practice…

The analysis of exemplars of different quality is a potentially powerful tool in enabling students to understand assessment expectations and appreciate academic standards. Through a systematic review methodology, this paper synthesises exemplar-based research designs, exemplar implementation and the educational effects of exemplars. The review of…

The past 20 years or so have seen increasing concern that our schooling system, set up for a different age, is not able to prepare today's learners for the fast-changing world they will live and work in. Strong arguments for radical change--not gradual improvement--have been made, from a number of quarters. There is some consensus about the broad…

Recent models relating to the affordance of children's participation rights, based on articles 12 and 13 of the United Nations Convention on the Rights Of the Child (1989), have focused on the role of and strategies used by the adults working with children ("Children and Society" 10, 2001: 107-117; "Children and Society" 20,…

Given the increasing demand for online learning at the tertiary level, there currently exists a need to modify or develop instructional design (ID) models/approaches that can effectively facilitate the collaboration between learning designers and teachers, as well as to research the effectiveness of these models/approaches. Against this backdrop,…

Learning advisors provide academic literacy development support in a variety of configurations, ranging from one-on-one consultations through to large-scale lectures. Such lectures can be generic, stand-alone modules or embedded within a discipline-specific course. Pragmatic and institutional considerations suggest that a generic model of delivery…

An academic's adoption of online learning during the 2020 lockdown required new levels of engagement with the learning management system (LMS). In this position piece, we suggest that academics are pivotal to online course development, and they should determine alternative means of instruction and assessment during any transition to online…

We interviewed 13 university teachers who research their teaching practices or their students' learning to identify how they understood their development as teachers. We interpreted recurring themes within the data as three ways of conceptualising university teachers' development as teachers. We use a theoretical model to arrange these…

Developing online learning communities is a promising pedagogical approach in online learning contexts for adult tertiary learners, but it is no easy task. Understanding how learning communities are formed and evaluating their efficacy in supporting learning involves a complex set of issues that have a bearing on the design and facilitation of…