New study by Julianne Turner et al.: Professional learning communities can be effective vehicles for teacher learning and instructional improvement, but little is known about how these changes occur.

Julianne C. Turner et al. studied professional learning communities as activity systems and chronicled their development under the leadership of teacher leaders over 2 years.

This is a thought-provoking webinar in which the authors (Jianwei Zhang & Mei-Hwa Chen) discussed this article with the four panelists - Keith Sawyer, Carol Chan, Chew-Lee Teo, and Kate Bielaczyc. Full video at https://youtu.be/VDajiY9U2lk

David Gibson: Would a fundamental confusion arise if the word ‘epistemic’ was not used as much? It seems like there is a potential to devalue the term through overuse?

I’d like to be enlightened on this; if there is a good definition that all learning is ‘epistemic’ to the learner...then what is the alternative that would be called forth by dropping the term?

I'm excited about the JLS annotation conversation throughout December, 2018! As this is a public conversation, I invite participants to track collaborative activity using the tool CROWDLAAERS ("crowd layers"), a public dashboard designed to report learning analytics associated with group – or ​crowd​ – discourse ​layers​ added via Hypothesis open web annotation to online content. Click this link to view real-time analytics specific to this document and conversation, including active participants, a calendar of activity, conversation threads, and tags. I hope text-participants find this tool useful!