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Collaborative professionalism engages teachers and other educators in the processes of documenting and presenting evidence arising from their practice, engaging in deep and demanding dialogue with colleagues, seeking and receiving constructive and productive feedback, and engaging in continuous collaborative inquiry. A design orientation that engages educators in such a process is design-based professional learning. While the overall design of the professional learning is consistent across contexts, three key features are unique to each design—situativity, the cyclical nature of learning and change, and agency. These three features are used to describe two cases of design-based professional learning in two different contexts. Based on 715 teachers, and school and district leaders’ learning engaged in design-based professional learning, we conclude that design-based professional learning provides a promising approach to professional learning.

The theoretical framework for this study draws on conceptual advances from two bodies of scholarship: 1) complexity thinking in education, which has recently focused on school system change and, 2) school leadership research, which has recently attended to the effects of leadership interventions to school improvement. Using a complexity-thinking framework, the purpose of this study was to understand how leadership practices contribute to shaping change in school systems and how change occurred across the system. Our study was conducted in an urban centre in Alberta within a public-school jurisdiction and in an area of the city that had a high population of students from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds from low-income households compared to other areas across the school jurisdiction. Students in this area typically scored in the lowest quartile on provincial standardized examinations. Our findings are significant because complexity thinking in the context of school leadership has not received sufficient empirical attention. In our study we identified and described pedagogical leadership practices that play a central role in redressing disparities currently found in schools.

Faculties of Education in North America are experiencing an increase in demand for professional graduate programs that provide flexible and accessible research pathways for working professionals. Our School of Education offers high quality professional graduate programs that increase access and respond directly to complex needs and problems of practice in education. We describe the design and design thinking approach our faculty collectively undertook to redesign our professional graduate programs. The design was guided by a commitment to research informed and research active learning experiences that enable professionals to develop expertise, draw upon evidence, and act with integrity as they lead innovation and change in educational organizations. The program design provides professionals with opportunities to complete their graduate program in both blended and online formats. Degree programs are cohort based, discipline focused, and coherently structured. Many of our specialized topics are developed in partnership with the professions we serve, and each of our graduate programs is grounded in current research and engages students in active research-based learning. Participatory, collaborative, and interdisciplinary learning experiences are characterized by signature pedagogies. Our professional graduate programs create scholars of the profession through strong connections with the disciplines, communities, and professions we serve. Results of the redesign include improved results in student satisfaction, time to completion, increased retention, and have yielded high completion rates. Design knowledge and insights gained after eight years of evaluation document the strength and quality of our graduates and an increased proportion of international students in all of our graduate program areas.

Designing a systematic inquiry-based, and knowledge-building experience through continuous professional learning for teachers is a key challenge for school authorities. A total of 26 teachers, five principals, three researchers, one graduate student, and two contract professionals from a university were involved in a research-practice partnership. The partners engaged in a yearlong design-based professional learning series. In this study, design-based research was used as the methodology to understand the participant responses to professional learning during the design, enactment, and refinement phases used to design the professional learning series. Open-ended survey responses, researcher field notes and documents from the professional learning sessions were analyzed throughout the study and during three phases of the learning design. The results indicated there were four key shifts and corresponding adaptations made by the participants as they responded to and engaged in a continuous model of professional learning.

The purpose of this paper is to highlight the work of one tripartite partnership with stakeholders to improve and strengthen novice teachers’ pedagogical designs using design based professional learning guided by the principles of knowledge building/knowledge creation. The tripartite partnership involved 450 novice teachers from an urban school division, a practitioner-research university team, and the provincial government. Drawing upon one case, this paper analyzes the ways in which the design-based professional learning mirrored the knowledge building/knowledge creation processes highlighting the ways in which teachers worked in collaborative, collective, and connected ways to progressively improve pedagogical designs for collective knowledge building. Computer supported, networked digital technologies provided a community to develop an audit trail to keep track of progressive improvements and refinements to their pedagogical designs and to support, enable, and enhance knowledge building discourse. Design-based professional learning informed by the 12 principles of knowledge building/knowledge creation provided novice teachers with a process to work collectively as a community, progressively improving and refining their pedagogical designs, identifying the role of their pedagogical designs in their students’ work, and engaging with other teachers in their respective schools.

In this chapter, the authors present and discuss findings from a two-year case study on teachers' professional learning. This investigation built upon existing research on early learning and technology to study teachers' professional learning in a community of practice, and the development of classroom-based learning designs and the ongoing inquiry of teachers from four school jurisdictions in the province of Alberta in Canada. Focus was on investigating ongoing continuous improvement of teacher design and assessment practices, to identify and share promising practices from the classroom, to capture teacher learning and engagement, to document the appropriate use of technology for learning and to identify and to understand system affordances and constraints for using technology with young learners.

The aim of this study was to examine a professional learning intervention designed to support new teachers with implementing professional practice competencies. Partners from a school authority joined researcher-practitioners from a university to engage in designing a professional learning series for new teachers. A design-based research approach using quantitative (pre- and post-surveys) and qualitative data (artifacts of learning, field notes, classroom observations) were analyzed over one year. There were over 450 participants involved in the professional learning series. The findings indicated the professional learning intervention positioned new teachers as designers of learning engaging in continuous cycles of design&ndash, enactment&ndash, reflection and strengthened their pedagogical capacity to interconnect professional practice competencies with support from a community of learners. The findings from this study have implications for supporting new teachers during a period of induction and demonstrate one way to provide new teachers with the foundation for continual growth throughout their career.

Visuals and graphics have been used for communicating complex ideas since 1786 when William Playfair first invented the line graph and bar chart. Graphs and charts are useful for interpretation and making sense of data. For instance, John Snow’s scatter plot helped pinpoint the source of a cholera outbreak in London in 1854 and also changed understandings of how germs were spread. While popular in the field of information graphics, rarely are graphs beyond the bar chart found in educational research articles. When present, the graphs do not necessarily enhance the findings of the data. Nor do educational research methods textbooks promote or instruct how to create visual representations to aid with interpretation and communication of findings. This paper attempts to address this void by sharing our processes for creating meaningful visual graphs for communicating multi-dimensional statistical findings more effectively. A working hypothesis was that carefully crafted visual graphics would convey our longitudinal research findings more effectively to broader audiences than existing forms. Three visuals were constructed from survey data three-year longitudinal design based research study of teacher and student learning in a one-to-one laptop school. The study focused on learning designs that changed and improved student learning experiences and outcomes by adopting inquiry approaches to teaching that incorporate meaningful uses of technology. In field tests, our audiences found the visuals were useful for interpreting the findings. More and more frequently, academics are required to communicate their findings to broader audiences. A well-designed and well-constructed graph(ic) can provide a means for effective communication of complex, multi-dimensional statistical data. Such effective communication is beneficial for both an academic audience as well as for broader audiences. The authors presented this paper that was previously published in JITE: Research

Efforts for recruiting and retaining students in engineering programs are evident in many postsecondary institutions around the world. These efforts include outreach programs at both elementary and secondary school level, as well as projects that develop capacities beyond technical content—often taught as declarative and procedural knowledge. The mandate of the Galileo Education Network Association includes the design of rich learning environments engaging K – 12 students in authentic tasks: tasks that resemble the real work of professionals such as engineers. We describe the experience of enacting a seven-session engineering project in thermodynamics with Grade Ten students. Special attention is paid to formative assessment as an essential support for students' learning along the project. The initial project resulted from the collaboration—as a means for teacher professional development—between this network association and the mathematics and science teachers in a western Canadian high school. We propose that programs for teacher professional development in mathematics and science should include a focus on tasks that resemble the work of engineering in order to design authentic, engaging learning tasks, and assessing strategies that support and enhance student learning.

Student engagement, and in particular intellectual engagement, has been identified as a key factor in learning at the high school level. While this type of engagement has an impact on student learning in fields related to science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM), it also has a positive impact on the learning of other disciplines such as English, Fine Arts, and Social Sciences. This report describes a set of projects co-designed by teachers and education specialists aimed at engaging students intellectually in each major high school subject area. Student use of mobile technologies, in this case the iPad2, features prominently in each of these projects. Interviews with teachers and students were conducted in order to identify evidence of intellectual engagement, as well as studentsâ?? interactions with the mobile device. Data from a survey was also used to identify the level of engagement of students involved in these projects.

While there have been numerous initiatives to promote and recruit students into postsecondary studies in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) around the world, traditional programs of studies for both K to 12 school and teacher education still lack an integrative approach to these disciplines. Addressing this concern, the Werklund School of Education of the University of Calgary started to offer a course in STEM education for the undergraduate Bachelor of Education program. The purpose of this article is to document the first iterations of this course. We draw from narratives of four instructors, including the coordinator of the course, and administrators who were actively involved in creation and approval of the course. We describe the course and its connection to the philosophy of the program, examine the context in which this course was conceived—including both national and provincial policy—and address some challenges and possibilities experienced by administrators, instructors and students during the creation and implementation of the course.

In order to increase mathematical literacy and achievement in grades K-12, mathematics educators at Galileo Educational Network work collaboratively with mathematicians and teachers to find different ways to address matters of mathematical knowledge, classroom pedagogy, resources, and assessment. We are working to develop ways to engage teachers in professional learning opportunities through which they can learn mathematics differently, increase their effectiveness in the teaching of mathematics, engage with and develop more robust mathematical problems, and connect with colleagues and mentors who are also attempting to increase mathematical literacy and achievement in their classrooms.