Teachers have faced serious public critique regarding their effectiveness and professionalism in classrooms. At every level, their work is often measured solely against student achievement outcomes, often on standardized tests (Darling-Hammond & Youngs, 2002; Ravitch, 2010). Unfortunately, students who are coming from culturally, economically, and linguistically diverse backgrounds are often occupying the bottom rungs regarding academic achievement (Ladson-Billings, 1995; Milner,2010; Hucks, 2014). What are the obstacles and challenges teachers and students face in their respective school settings and how do they grapple with and overcome them? Finally, what do these teachers and students know that motivates and informs their work? The scholars in this volume will take up these questions and share the findings of their research in the field of leadership, teacher education, and achievement. These concerns are not limited to the geographic boundaries of the United States of America. Engaging purposeful teaching is an imperative that concerns students, teachers, teacher educators, educational leaders, and education policy makers around the globe. There are many educators worldwide who are committed to delivering this type of teaching and promoting learning that is engaged and active. The four sections of the book capture the work of educators in teaching in diverse global settings such as the Australia, United Kingdom, Jamaica, Turkey, and across America. As diverse populations of students enter American classrooms, it is important for their teachers to have relatable examples of purposeful teaching that are culturally responsive and culturally relevant.

Teachers have faced serious public critique regarding their effectiveness and professionalism in classrooms. At every level, their work is often measured solely against student achievement outcomes, often on standardized tests (Darling-Hammond & Youngs, 2002; Ravitch, 2010). Unfortunately, students who are coming from culturally, economically, and linguistically diverse backgrounds are often occupying the bottom rungs regarding academic achievement (Ladson-Billings, 1995; Milner,2010; Hucks, 2014). What are the obstacles and challenges teachers and students face in their respective school settings and how do they grapple with and overcome them? Finally, what do these teachers and students know that motivates and informs their work? The scholars in this volume will take up these questions and share the findings of their research in the field of leadership, teacher education, and achievement. These concerns are not limited to the geographic boundaries of the United States of America. Engaging purposeful teaching is an imperative that concerns students, teachers, teacher educators, educational leaders, and education policy makers around the globe. There are many educators worldwide who are committed to delivering this type of teaching and promoting learning that is engaged and active. The four sections of the book capture the work of educators in teaching in diverse global settings such as the Australia, United Kingdom, Jamaica, Turkey, and across America. As diverse populations of students enter American classrooms, it is important for their teachers to have relatable examples of purposeful teaching that are culturally responsive and culturally relevant.

Adopting a multilevel perspective, this innovative Research Agenda offers a comprehensive and critical overview of research on all aspects of contemporary leadership education. Bringing together enlightening contributions from experienced scholars of leadership education along with a team of early career critical scholars, it examines essential dimensions of leadership education processes and outcomes and interrogates the knowledge bases that shape these dimensions.

Imagination for Inclusion offers a reconsideration of the ways in which imagination engages and empowers learners across the education spectrum, from primary to adult levels and in all subject areas. Imagination as a natural, expedient, and exciting learning tool should be central to any approach to developing and implementing curriculum, but is increasingly undervalued as learners progress through the education system; this disregards not only imagination’s potential, but its paramount place in informing truly inclusive approaches to teaching and learning. This book presents a new theory of imagination and includes discussion about its application to teaching and learning to increase the engagement of disaffected students and reinvigorate their relationships with curriculum content. Chapters include key ideas and discussion surrounding the benefits of introducing imaginative practices into the classroom for learners from a range of marginalised backgrounds, such as young people with disabilities and adult learners from socio-economically disadvantaged environments. In exploring imagination in the practice of inclusive education, the book includes chapters from researchers and practitioners in education who have fresh ideas about how learners and teachers have benefited from introducing imaginative pedagogies. The diverse collection, featuring writers with backgrounds from early childhood to adult education, will be essential reading for academics and researchers in the fields of education, inclusive education, social policy, professional development, teacher education and creativity. It will be of particular interest to current and pre-service teachers who want to develop inclusive practice and increase the engagement of all students with formal education.

Decades of research have shown that early-career teachers face a number of challenges and hold an increasingly wide set of responsibilities. Teacher educators, therefore, must think carefully about how to prepare early-career teachers for the profession. Additionally, however, the work of teaching and teacher education has become increasingly complex within the context of the current virtual age, including the prominent reality of social media and the significant possibilities of online teaching and learning. Research, Practice, and Innovations in Teacher Education During a Virtual Age makes a significant contribution to the scholarship on teacher education by presenting a variety of evidence-based methods that can be used to develop and improve aspects of teacher education within this virtual age, including the curriculum and pedagogy of online teacher education as well as effective ways to prepare preservice teachers for the realities of online teaching and online learning. Covering topics such as virtual caring, learning material adaptation, and instructional coaching, this premier reference source is a dynamic resource for teacher educators, pre-service teachers, administrators and educators of both K-12 and higher education, government officials, policymakers, researchers, and academicians.

Mandates to implement practices that are antithetical to what we embrace as supportive of young children’s literacy learning are pervasive. Teachers of young children are asked to teach-to-the test in ways that take away opportunities for holistic, thoughtful, play-oriented practices that allow children to construct knowledge through contextualized and purposeful experiences. In 2009 the Early Childhood Assembly was formed by a group of early childhood educators to provide a home at the National Council for Teacher of English for all who work with young children. Perspectives and Provocations in Early Childhood Education is a publication of the ECEA. The publication is intended to support teachers of young children and those interested in studying about early literacy by putting on offer texts with a strong emphasis on promoting thoughtful practices that enhance the teaching and learning of young children within and across diverse communities. All royalties from the book go to the ECEA to help the organization advance its goals of providing scholarships for early childhood teachers to participate in conferences and professional development events.

This book explores future directions in Singaporean education as it moves beyond its historically formative goals of survival, efficiency and performance, and its emphasis on grades and formal credentialing. It examines the future of education via the 4Life framework, a four-form model for purposeful learning centered around social-emotional regulation and the well-being of the individual learner: Life-long learning, the learning that occurs over a learner's lifespan; Life-deep learning, a deep understanding of learned content and adaptive expertise; Life-wide learning, learning in multiple contexts besides the school environment; and Life-wise learning, learning which focuses on the learner's values, morals, character and historical empathy. This book also illustrates how purposeful learning serves to equip learners with the knowledge, skills, dispositions and competencies they need to thrive as adaptive workers in the economy of the future.

Co-published with The International Research Foundation for English Language Education (TIRF), the ninth volume in the Global Research on Teaching and Learning English series presents research on the practice of integrating content and language in diverse contexts where English is used as a medium of instruction. With chapters written by TIRF Doctoral Dissertation Grant awardees and other scholars, the volume offers an overview of a wide range of methodological approaches to teaching content in English to English learners and examines factors that impede or contribute to effective instruction. The chapters include findings from original empirical research, as well as overviews of existing research and model programs, providing valuable insights and taking into account a multitude of contextual features. Offering up-to-date research on integrating language and content at the primary, secondary, and postsecondary levels, this book familiarizes readers with the latest advances in theory and practice. It is a key text for teacher education courses for preservice teachers, a resource for professional development programs for practicing teachers, and a useful reference for researchers.

This volume looks at the preparation of future critical language teachers in the face of an increasingly multilingual and transcultural contemporary world. This is seen through the lens of the collapse of Nation-State borders that crumble in the face of migration and the intense flow of languages that comes with it. It brings together international research that problematizes, theorizes, re-positions and re-conceptualizes myriad structural, systemic, ideological, political and pedagogical issues that intersect with the possibilities and impossibilities of the development of language teachers' agency. The volume examines the needs of linguistically diverse student populations and considers the socio-cultural and socio-political barriers that interfere with the exercise of teacher agency for social justice in language classrooms. It offers a theoretical and empirical overview of how language teacher education has addressed multilingualism and transculturalism in critical approaches in many complex countries in their diversity and/or postcolonial history, including Brazil, Qazaqstan, Scotland, and Thailand.

Disability Studies and the Inclusive Classroom is a core textbook that integrates knowledge and practice from the fields of disability studies and special education. The second edition has been fully revised and updated throughout to include stronger connections between race, class, sexual orientation, gender, and disability to emphasize intersecting identities and experiences; stronger emphasis on curriculum and teaching rather than on attitudes toward disability; and updates to current events, cultural references, resources, research literature, laws, and policies.