Learning Community

This article uses qualitative data to describe how administrators and teachers in one urban middle school, Woodsedge, 1 shared leadership tasks to develop an authentic learning community. This middle school, which serves a multiethnic student population representing extremes of the economic spectrum, was one of 88 schools participating in a school-based reform initiative in a major city in the southwestern United States. The reform focused dollars on high-quality professional development for administrators and teachers. By engaging in their own powerful learning, teachers at

Salinas De Gortari (1988) gave a high priority to teaching as part of his agenda developed during his term as president in the last six years. The current Mexican President Ernesto Zedillo also from the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) continues to vigorously support a similar educational policy after assuming power in 1 December 1994. Moreover, Zedillo himself helped design the educational agenda as one of the four In the mid-1990s I was asked by the World Bank to carry out a short-term study of the teacher education component of the PARE program. Analysis of secondary research reports and program documents, and a week of classroom and school observations and interviews with program personnel and participants (teachers, principals and supervisors) served as sources of data. Using what I learned in this preliminary study, I examine the challenges associated with the introduction of constructivist approaches to educate rural teachers using Mexico's PARE as a case study.

There is a growing number and diversity of students in Australian universities. A disturbingly high proportion of students adopt passive roles in structured classes, thereby forfeiting the opportunity to engage actively in the learning process. A clearer understanding of factors influencing active participation is likely to encourage re-evaluation of how the classroom setting is structured. In 2008, a questionnaire was administered on-line across the Division of Health Sciences in an Australian university. Survey items represented: self-reported participation in classes; fear of teacher and peer criticisms; peer support; family and school background; confidence; informal contact with teachers; and expectations of students' roles at university. Path analysis assessed independence and interdependence of pathways linking participation with hypothesised predictors. 764 respondents (559 females) provided complete responses (29% response rate). Among males and females there was a relatively strong pathway linking fear of teachers, confidence and participation, with higher levels of fear predicting lower confidence and participation. In turn, students' perceptions of their role in the learning process was strongly associated with fear of teachers, indicating that undergraduate students' belief that it is inappropriate to ask questions indirectly reduces their confidence to participate through fear of teacher criticisms. A direct association was seen between students' perceptions of their role in the learning process and fear of peer criticism, suggesting that the pressure to play a passive role is reinforced by peer pressure. Students' perceptions of their role was associated with school and family background, suggesting that earlier encouragement to communicate influences students' perceived role and status at university.

A large number of studies have been carried out on second/foreign language learners' identities, but there seems to be insufficient research on the constitutive effect of discourse on L2 learners' identities, especially among English learners in China. Informed by discourse theory, this study explored how college students' identities were discursively constructed in and through their English learning experiences. This study identified the discursive strategies of establishing oppositions and differences that the students adopted in identity construction as they interacted within the specific learning community, the surrounding social environment and an imagined global community. The paper starts by discussing the constructs that guide the study and then provides an interpretation of the extracts from interviews and diary studies in a way that takes account of the socio-cultural context in which the investigation takes place. #

The Biomind program is a new open inquiry program for Israeli biology high school students. The Biomind program is facilitated by diverse activities of asynchronous on-line forums for teachers and students. This research aims to analyse the discussions that occurred over a period of three years in these forums, in order to obtain a picture of the benefits that virtual discussions hold for the implementation of the open inquiry program. The results presented in this article indicate that students required assistance mainly with searching scientific information, finding experimental techniques and procedures, and phrasing inquiry questions. The three most frequent areas that were discussed in the teachers' forum were technical and procedural aspects of experimentation, bureaucracy and phenomenon identification. In addition, issues such as inferring and discussing, logical progression of the inquiry process, scientific writing, teacherstudent interaction, reflective thinking, affective points of view, and forum administration were raised in the forum discourses. The forum discourses create a learning community that contributes to the implementation of the Biomind program, and pinpoint the aspects that should be taken into consideration in the future.

The Bachelor of Nursing (BN) program at Central Queensland University requires students to complete industry based clinical practicum in each of the 3 years of their program. Students spend 40– 60% of their week off campus in clinical practicum. The Bachelor of Nursing Program Gateway (BNPG) is the application of the traditional Blackboard course management system from a single course to a whole program. It has pushed the boundaries of online course management creating an online learning community that consists of students, lecturers, clinical laboratory managers, administration staff, program advisors and industry clinical staff from three Central Queensland University campuses (Rockhampton, Mackay and Bundaberg), one hub (Noosa) and Flexible delivery. This paper will adopt Wenger, McDermott, and Synder's (2002) seven principles of communities of practice to discuss development strategies that have proved successful, as well as some of the pitfalls experienced and lessons learn...

In this paper we investigate the use of hierarchical reinforcement learning to speed up the acquisition of cooperative multi-agent tasks. We extend the MAXQ framework to the multi-agent case. Each agent uses the same MAXQ hierarchy to decompose a task into sub-tasks. Learning is decentralized, with each agent learning three interrelated skills: how to perform subtasks, which order to do them in, and how to coordinate with other agents. Coordination skills among agents are learned by using joint actions at the highest level(s) of the hierarchy. The Q nodes at the highest level(s) of the hierarchy are configured to represent the joint task-action space among multiple agents. In this approach, each agent only knows what other agents are doing at the level of sub-tasks, and is unaware of lower level (primitive) actions. This hierarchical approach allows agents to learn coordination faster by sharing information at the level of sub-tasks, rather than attempting to learn coordination taking into account primitive joint state-action values. We apply this hierarchical multi-agent reinforcement learning algorithm to a complex AGV scheduling task and compare its performance and speed with other learning approaches, including flat multi-agent, single agent using MAXQ, selfish multiple agents using MAXQ (where each agent acts independently without communicating with the other agents), as well as several well-known AGV heuristics like "first come first serve", "highest queue first" and "nearest station first". We also compare the tradeoffs in learning speed vs. performance of modeling joint action values at multiple levels in the MAXQ hierarchy. * Currently at Agilent Technologies, CA.

This paper presents a research study carried out to support and structure virtual interaction among university students that may trigger collaborative knowledge construction in the Web, supported by a CSCL system called KnowCat. Three characteristics of the KnowCat system are relevant to our educational purpose: firstly, students can share and consult their documents, enabling them to find out how their classmates have accomplished a specific task; secondly, students can express their opinion about any document in the system. These opinions have been used in our study as explicit assistance, or scaffold, which one student gives another in order to improve his/her work. Thirdly, the KnowCat system supports students with coordinating their perspectives on specific knowledge through a mechanism called Knowledge Crystallisation, which organises community knowledge as a result of their participants' interactions.

In a course labelled "math methods" for preservice elementary school teachers, the focus is on constructivist philosophy and teaching as synonymous with research. The participants consciously view themselves as teacher-learners by continuously looking at their perception of self in a set of written responses: "Self-portrait as a Teacher." Three of these self-reflections are collected over ten weeks. The data show that the initial stage is a general, often vague, perception and description of a mathematics teacher, reflecting the media portrayal of the necessity of mathematics in schools, followed by confusion and frustration of not knowing mathematics in sufficient depth to explain it to others. The final portrait shows some resolution of conflict and self-discovery in "doing" mathematics. In all, the practice of selfregulation becomes progressively more evident. Although teaching is acknowledged as a reflective practice, ways of facilitating the self reflection of preservice teachers are not Widely known. The use of self-portraits brings out the profile of a learner, which helps provide individual and group preparation, and assists in building a learning community of teachers.

This article addresses strategies for promoting culturally responsive pedagogy through the implementation of a language awareness curriculum that includes a structured reading intervention program using dual language books. The research builds on the premise that resources such as dual language books can give teachers the opportunity to effectively implement strategies in multilingual/multicultural classrooms that build on children's cultural capital and create a stronger learning community. Through a longitudinal study, the researcher followed the trajectory of one teacher inductee to examine how her involvement with this project prepared her to work with and teach in a multilingual/multicultural setting of diverse learners. The article examines the following 2 questions: (a) How are teachers being prepared to work within culturally and linguistically diverse classrooms, and (b) What role can dual language books play in the diverse classroom of a pre-service/first-year teacher?

Many aspects of design require engineers to make choices based on non-quantifiable personal perspectives. These decisions touch issues in aesthetics, ethics, social impact, and responsibility and sustainability. Part of Baylor University’s mission is to provide a learning community in which Christian life values and worldviews might be integrated into academic disciplines. In view of this institutional commitment, members of the Engineering faculty are investigating how Christian worldviews might interact with elements of engineering design in such a way as to produce uniquely Christian insights and inform the non-quantifiable aspects of the engineering process.

Relations between external researchers and indigenous communities have been increasingly strained by differences in understanding and in expectation about the relevance of research. In the field of resource management, the potential for conflict over research is increased by the politics surrounding control over the resource management decision making processes. In this article, we propose the creation of dialogic networks that engage researchers and indigenous people as collaborators in a process of knowledge production. Such an applied research process can produce context-specific knowledge networks that support management and planning decisions by indigenous people; these networks we refer to as place-based learning communities. We present a researcher's perspective on this approach through our experience with the Shoal Lake Resource Institute of Iskatewizaagegan No. 39 Independent First Nation located in northwestern Ontario.

As online and blended learning has become common place educational strategy in higher education, educators need to reconceptualise fundamental issues of teaching, learning and assessment in non traditional spaces. These issues include concepts such as validity and reliability of assessment in online environments in relation to serving the intended purposes, as well as understanding how formative assessment functions within online and blended learning. This article provides a systematic qualitative review of the research literature on online formative assessment in higher education. As an integrative narrative review, the method applied in this review entailed systematic searching, reviewing, and writing this review of the literature to bring together key themes and findings of research in this field. The authors applied qualitative thematic criteria in selecting and reviewing the available literature from which they focused on identifying and analyzing the core themes that are centr...

Christian education is distinctly different from other approaches to education. But knowing what that distinctiveness is and acting consistently on it is vital, for Christian schools to be authentic and to justify their existence. This article seeks to identify fundamental premises underlying Christian education; then to establish a set of ground rules for critical discussion and the development of a model to faithfully represent that enterprise. The purpose of the model is twofold: to capture realistically the dynamic nature or 'special character' of Christian schools as communities of faith, and in so doing, provide a useful frame of reference for critical review, strategic planning and renewal of schools calling themselves 'Christian'.

This paper presents the results of a 3-year quasi-experimental study of three Masters courses in computing. The purpose of this study was to investigate the extent to which the teaching and learning of these courses were enhanced by being developed and delivered in an online format as compared to face-to-face full-time and part-time delivery. Key methodological questions and issues to be examined were: (a) any observable difference in student performance as measured by end-of-module grades/marks; (b) any observable difference between coursework and exam performance in the technically-oriented modules; (c) any observable difference in dropout rates, student satisfaction and faculty satisfaction. The study examined the results from 4684 module enrolments, consisting of 269 online students, 796 part-time students, and 3619 full-time students distributed across 7 modules and 79 module instantiations. The data was gathered using a variety of different means which included interviews, end of module questionnaires, student records and enrolment data. The results show that the online students consistently perform better then the face-toface students and the paper reflects on this finding.

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others have taught us, is a construct of arrogance on the part of Western societies designed to preserve their pre-eminence. Perhaps we should stop writing books about education specifically in developing societies, and re-explore the concept of developments (plural) and educations (plural) in relation to all societies. Bray's work in this book and elsewhere comes closest to this. This is not to say this book is not valuable: it is of great interest and usefulness. The wide range of its essays commends it, for there is much information here not easily available. And its argument about cultural factors in educational policy making is surely persuasive. At the same time, it is provocative, as all good books will be. It is good to hear again Little's arguments about the cultural gap between teacher and learner, even if (as she indicates) the situation is more complicated than a simple duality; and it is good to read again Leach's work on Sudan, now modified to defend small projects despite their dangers. But one criticism must be made: the index is appallingly bad. Some of the entries are partial: for example, one of the best bits on culture is on pages 159-160, on development is on pages 283-286, on numeracy (to be found under mathematics!) on pages 339-341, all of which are omitted; and there is no entry for "indigenous" or "curriculum" etc. No academic publisher should allow a work of this nature to appear without a fuller index. Readers are recommended to do what I did, make your own index as you go along.

Personalizing the school environment is a central goal of efforts to transform America's schools. Three decades of work by the Project on High Performance Learning Communities are considered that demonstrate the potential impact and importance of the creation of "small learning environments" on student motivation, adjustment, and well-being. Findings about how to effectively create such small learning environments in middle and secondary school are presented. Of particular focus are the ways in which ecological changes that create smaller schools within large ones, teacher and student teams, and other personalization strategies may engage diverse, socially, and economically disadvantaged students, in middle and high schools, to improve academic performance, reduce dropout rates, enhance developmental outcomes, and close equity gaps.

Big Math for Little Kids, a comprehensive program for 4- and 5-year-olds, develops and expands on the mathematics that children know and are capable of doing. The program uses activities and stories to develop ideas about number, shape, pattern, logical reasoning, measurement, operations on numbers, and space. The activities introduce the mathematical ideas in a coherent, carefully sequenced fashion, and are designed to promote curiosity and excitement about learning and doing mathematics. The program produces playful but purposeful learning of deep mathematical ideas, and encourages children to think about and express their mathematical thinking. Throughout the program, great emphasis is placed on the development of mathematical and mathematics-related language. Our observations suggest two broad questions for future research: What kinds of competence can children develop in the context of a rich mathematics environment? In what ways can mathematics learning promote language and literacy?

This article examines the role that professional experiences (practicum) can play in building resilience in pre-service teachers. In particular it focuses on a learning communities model of professional experience with its emphasis on relationships and its attention to the complex and dynamic interactions between individuals and their 'student teaching' contexts. This article draws on a number of studies including evaluations of two cohorts of graduate Bachelor of Education (primary) students and a self-study based on the work of two university academics. Jordan's [2006. Relational resilience in girls. In S. Goldstein, & R. Brooks, (Eds.), Handbook of resilience in children. New York: Springer] model of relational resilience -with its characteristics of mutuality, empowerment and the development of courage -is used as a conceptual framework for illuminating some of the emerging insights from our work with the Learning Communities model.

Faculty in post-secondary institutions must continually reassess, refine, and revise their teaching, yet it is a challenge for them to gain this professional development with heavy teaching responsibilities and high demands on their time. Creating Optimum Learning Environments (CREOLE) is a collaborative project between one community college and one university to develop an online training program for post-secondary education faculty on the basic principles of teaching and learning and the development of online courses. Four independent modules were developed and taught in a one semester format for educators throughout the U.S. The goal of this research was to identify the strenghts and challenges of this course; determine the changes in pedagogical practice of the participating faculty members; and to examine the resulting changes in participants' course materials to reflect learning and motivation theories, and appropriate online learning strategies. Methods included pre-and post-surveys of the participants, interviews, document analysis, and instructors' reflections. Results demonstrated high expectations from all participants, difficulty in forming a sustained learning community, continuing challenge in technological aspects, and requirement for intense instructor involvement to maintain morale. D

Learning communities have become a widespread model for teacher development. However, simply bringing teachers together does not ensure community development. This study offers a framework for the development of a teacher learning community in a video club. Qualitative coding of video data resulted in characterizing the evolution of the video club group as they collaboratively explored issues of teaching and learning that arose in each other's classrooms. The relationship between dimensions of the framework and how development on one feature interacts with development on another is discussed. The results inform the design of video-based learning environments for examining teaching practice.

No school is an island; it is a part of a continuum or a pipeline of institutions which together form an educational pipeline through which groups of students pass. To turn a body of data into useful information for knowledge-based decision-making at any level, data must be collected, organised, analysed and reflected upon. The purpose of this paper is to discuss how schools and other educational institutions can not only collect better data but learn how to transform that data so that the information held within can be effectively shared among all stakeholders. This process will help to ensure that the school and the entire education system provide a more seamless and effective educational pipeline for students, and ultimately improve the quality of education delivered in the country as a whole.

This article reflects on the cross-cultural communicative experiences of professors from South Africa and students from Sudan, during a two-year Internet-supported Masters' course in Computers in Education. Four of Hofstede's cultural dimensions were considered as categories of interpretation. The purpose of the research was to determine the extent to which Hofstede's static quantitative, research could be used as a basis for an essentially qualitative dynamic interpretation. While Hofstede's work focuses on cultural differences, this article tries to uncover what commonalities were constructed in the process. It was found that in this case, dimensions such as power distance and uncertainty avoidance tended to amplify each other, while together they resulted in a movement away from individualism towards collectivism. Accommodating across cultures did not mean that one should move into the other culture. Three elements seem to play a role when cultures meet: Reduction of communicative uncertainty, construction of shared meaning, and appropriate use of technology. More research should be conducted to uncover the elements that are common to cultures because emphasising commonality seems more useful than trying to overcome differences.

This article presents a review of 29 empirical studies to identify the main foci of research on student teachers’ identity, the methodologies used and their major findings. The reviewed studies were found to investigate four broad factors: the contribution of: (1) reflective activities, (2) learning communities, (3) context and (4) (prior) experiences. Reflective practices and interviews were found to be mainly used by researchers as data collection tools and the findings were mainly reported to be changes in components of student teachers’ identity, including their cognitive knowledge, sense of agency and voice. Questions raised in this review and suggestions for further research are discussed.

Design studio has been the heart of architectural education since late 18 th C and thus students often consider other courses as peripheral to studio. In a majority of schools, the nature of the design studio pedagogy and the way that other courses are taught appear as two systems. Courses 'supporting studio' have been very much a teacher-centred didactic exercise, traditionally delivered in lectures.

A large number of studies have been carried out on second/foreign language learners’ identities, but there seems to be insufficient research on the constitutive effect of discourse on L2 learners’ identities, especially among English learners in China. Informed by discourse theory, this study explored how college students’ identities were discursively constructed in and through their English learning experiences. This study identified the discursive strategies of establishing oppositions and differences that the students adopted in identity construction as they interacted within the specific learning community, the surrounding social environment and an imagined global community. The paper starts by discussing the constructs that guide the study and then provides an interpretation of the extracts from interviews and diary studies in a way that takes account of the socio-cultural context in which the investigation takes place.

Earlier studies have suggested that higher education institutions could harness the predictive power of Learning Management System (LMS) data to develop reporting tools that identify at-risk students and allow for more timely pedagogical interventions. This paper confirms and extends this proposition by providing data from an international research project investigating which student online activities accurately predict academic achievement. Analysis of LMS tracking data from a Blackboard Vista-supported course identified 15 variables demonstrating a significant simple correlation with student final grade. Regression modelling generated a best-fit predictive model for this course which incorporates key variables such as total number of discussion messages posted, total number of mail messages sent, and total number of assessments completed and which explains more than 30% of the variation in student final grade. Logistic modelling demonstrated the predictive power of this model, which correctly identified 81% of students who achieved a failing grade. Moreover, network analysis of course discussion forums afforded insight into the development of the student learning community by identifying disconnected students, patterns of student-to-student communication, and instructor positioning within the network. This study affirms that pedagogically meaningful information can be extracted from LMS-generated student tracking data, and discusses how these findings are informing the development of a customizable dashboardlike reporting tool for educators that will extract and visualize real-time data on student engagement and likelihood of success.

In line with the mainstream research on e-learning, we propose a model of the continued usage of e-learning communication tools by learners. We observe in particular that there are two less studied but potentially very important factors, learning self-efficacy and compatibility of values and beliefs with learning tools, which may contribute significantly to the continued usage of e-learning communication tools. We carried out a study of 682 e-learners and the results support our propositions.

You can't be growing all the time. There are ebbs and flows: when you get into a new school year; after a few weeks; the beginning of a new term; the end of term tidying up and rewards and satisfaction. No document you can produce will ever show us all those layers. (Headteacher, quoted in Stoll et al. 2006b, booklet

The present article describes activities undertaken in the virtual world called ''Euroland'' to promote collaborative knowledge building, using a variety of communication formats. The communication formats available in Euroland are text-based via a chat (synchronous) and a discussion forum (asynchronous); and visual in the form of virtual objects, pictures, and photos. Euroland has been designed, implemented, and evaluated by a Dutch-Italian community composed of students, teachers, and researchers performing educational, cross-cultural, and interdisciplinary tasks. The relevant theoretical perspectives concerning collaborative knowledge building, visualization within a three-dimensional environment, and the community of learners and the community of practices models are also reviewed. A qualitative evaluation of the activities performed in Euroland is then undertaken. It is concluded that the activities involving different communication formats within a virtual world are only appreciated and used when the community of users reaches a particular level of awareness with regard to the technical and cognitive functions of each format. When integrated, the communication formats are found to have a reciprocal influence on each other. The community is able to generate new activities not planned in advance, depending upon the specific situation, which gets defined during the interaction between the various participants in Euroland.

How can language teachers who feel isolated from their colleagues and excluded from the development of their school’s language teaching curricula build a sense of community? Citing research on the definition of "community" (Stewart, 2007) and Edge's (1992) concept of "cooperative development", the author discusses his experiences organizing an informal series of meetings for teachers from May 2007 to present at Ritsumeikan University in Kyoto called the “Ritsumeikan Language Teachers’ Roundtable” (renamed "the Ritsumeikan TEFL Faculty Development Roundtable" after publication of this article). The article presents participants' views of the meetings' benefits, such as their capacity to help teachers' professional development, as well as their views of the drawbacks, namely that the same teachers often attend, limiting the range of feedback participants receive. It also offers ideas as to how these meetings can be improved, and suggests how teachers at other universities can start their own Roundtables. The author’s hope is that teachers elsewhere will be able to reflect on the needs of their own workplaces, and use the experiences described herein to begin their own informal Roundtable meetings.

As Computer Science (CS) educators, we are involved in teaching a variety of undergraduate and graduate courses such as database management systems, networking, software development and web development courses. In addition to the traditional classroom environment, we use online and blended teaching methods to enhance student participation and improve the achievement of learning objectives. Typical online supplements to classroom instruction include posting homework, links to external resources, lecture notes and exams online. Asynchronous discussions and synchronous chat sessions provide additional forums outside the classroom for strengthening interaction and enriching the learning experience for students. This paper focuses on how asynchronous discussions can be used to enhance student participation in CS courses; increased participation leads to learning effectiveness, rich involvement with the course content, and student satisfaction. Categories and Subject Descriptors K.3.1 [Co...

This report is based on the analysis of initial interviews with the staff of the Freshmen Learning Community Program (FLCP) staff. FLCP is a pilot program in engineering education that focuses on diversity and cultural change. Data includes structured open-ended interviews and observations of discussion sections and learning program meetings. Evaluation findings indicate that in 1995 FLCP was moderately successful for a small subset of students. The program appears to foster a sense of group identity, providing students with a sense of belonging at the university. Findings also suggest a significant impact on student learning processes through the fostering of a collaborative learning approach. (DDR)