Building a Sustainable Learning Cycle: The Role of ‘the Formative Use of Summative Tests’ (FUST) in Promoting Students’ Developments

The study employed a descriptive mixed-methods qualitative case study approach. Material and interview-based data were collected from two EFL classes in a private international school in central China. Findings from RQ1 suggest that teacher-made summative tests were largely dependable to the extent that the tests reflect the syllabus-based construct and address students’ affective factors. Findings from RQ2 suggest that facilitating factors including in-school continuous professional development (CPD) and teacher collegiality practices may enhance FUST’s prospective role.

Maintaining the Frame: Using Frame Analysis to Explain Teacher Evaluation Policy Implementation

While researchers have shown great interest in understanding teacher evaluation, little is known about how teachers’ actions and interactions surrounding evaluation affect the dual goals of evaluation—accountability and development. Using data collected during a yearlong ethnographic study at three schools (combined with follow-up interviews four years later), this study employs frame analysis to describe and explain how teachers formed a group perspective about the new evaluation policy, how this perspective informed their actions and interactions, and the consequences that these actions and interactions had on teacher collegiality, teacher learning, and instructional improvement.

Teacher Collegiality in Context of Institutional Logics: A Conceptual Literature Review

This article presents an analysis and discussion of the conceptions of teacher collegiality in times of restructuring, where a shift in the governance of teachers’ work from bureaucratic to market principles can be identified. In addition, several actors from different cultural and social worlds want to contribute to education policy and school success, often through collegiality. Through a conceptual research review, a selection of articles on how teacher collegiality is assigned meaning in the context of different institutional logics is analysed. Different kinds of collegiality are presented, all of which have something to contribute to the understanding of teachers’ work; however, they imply different things. Such differences need to be clarified in order to improve the exchange of ideas, cooperation, and mutual understanding between actors in different cultural and social worlds. Researchers, actors, and experts in market-driven societies will thereby have a better chance to exchange ideas and actually understand each other.

Push, Pull and Nudge: The Future of Teaching and Educational Change

This paper draws on recent research on teacher collegiality and professional learning communities to unpack the nature, benefits and drawbacks of different forms of collegial relations, especially in circumstances of high stakes reform. In particular the paper examines the relative merits of pulling change by inspiring and enthusing teachers in their efforts by appeal to the moral principles of their work, or pushing change by placing teachers in situations requiring changes in practice in the hope that this will then lead to changes in their beliefs. The paper finds that teachers sometimes have to be drawn or pulled into professional learning communities, and sometimes they have to be driven or pushed by them. However, pulling should not be so weak that it permits no collaboration at all, and pushing should not be so excessive that it amounts to shoving or bullying. Instead, collaboration will often require the nudges of deliberate arrangements to enhance learning.