Learning-focused Teacher Leadership: The Professional Development School (PDS) Advantage

Professional development schools (PDS), a specific type of school-university partnership, offer distinctive learning environments for teachers by encouraging innovation and modeling best instructional practices. In PDS partnerships, opportunities abound for teachers to assume learning-focused leadership roles such as team lead, instructional coach, and professional developer. Drawing from the book Teacher Leadership in Professional Development Schools, this article recounts stories of learning-focused teacher leadership in two different PDS partnerships that resulted in positive outcomes for kindergarten through fifth grade English Learners (EL) and for ninth grade algebra students. Supported by research, the stories illustrate how providing embedded support and opportunities for teacher leadership through the PDS core practices of teacher preparation, professional development, inquiry and research, and student learning is advantageous for both teachers and students.

Creative destruction in the Australian videogames industry

The Australian games industry is a textbook case in creative destruction. Australian developers have adaptively engaged with the rapidly transforming and uncertain conditions of the global videogames industry. Some developers celebrate the creative freedom they experienced with a shift towards original intellectual property games for mobile platforms, while others caution about the design and craft compromises associated with the in-app monetisation mechanics. The turmoil and rapidly transforming Australian videogames industry over the past few years is certainly characterised by precarious labour. But it also includes experimentation in studio culture and associated changes in professional developer identity so as to continue the craft of making videogames in the midst of this uncertainty. This diversity is also characterised by differences among the production cultures of Melbourne, Brisbane and Sydney that are indicators of the cultural roots that sustain developer identity and business models.