University-school partnerships are important constellations for teachers’ professional learning. The present study investigates how both teacher characteristics and contextual factors are related to teachers’ motivation to participate in the university-school partnership, and the relationship between…

How do secondary school teachers’ professional learning preferences relate to teaching experience and the school context?

Teaching reading comprehension in secondary education

What are relationships between student teachers’ personal characteristics, learning experiences and perception of external environmental aspects impacting teacher career and their commitment to teaching?

To what extent do beginning teachers use, create and claim agency at their school?

The World Teachers Programme (WTP) is a bilingual profile of the Initial Teacher Education programme geared towards bilingual and international education.

ICLON provides several programmes for second and first degree teaching qualifications.

The present project aims to provide valuable insights for the professional development of international teachers, and also for improving the quality of foreign language education.

The aim of this thesis was to examine what teachers want to learn themselves. The main research question was: what, how and why teachers want to learn? And does this depend on their years of teaching experience and the school at which they work?

The motivation of student teachers for the teacher's profession depends on various factors. Teacher training can influence the commitment of students.

Collaboration is increasingly common among teachers in schools. As such, teacher education should prepare prospective teachers to effectively interact with other teachers in different types of communities or groups.

Social aspects of the learning environment, also called classroom climate, are important for students’ cognitive and affective learning outcomes. In this thesis the classroom climate is operationalised by means of two components: the teacher-class relationship and classroom discipline.

This dissertation set out to provide both an integrated framework for the practices of teacher peer feedback and an in-depth understanding of teacher peer feedback in the Chinese vocational education context.

How do university lecturers perceive and exercise teacher agency, and what approaches can effectively explore agentic actions and underlying beliefs?

How can teachers best learn from each other and develop? Jacobiene Meirink is conducting research on professional development for teachers in secondary education. She is particularly interested in how teachers collaborate on and learn from the development of teaching programmes. More insight into effective…

The studies reported in this thesis were situated in the context of an innovation of Dutch secondary school biology curricula. As in any innovation, the practical knowledge of teachers determine the outcomes through the decisions they make while planning and teaching their lessons. The aim of the studies…

Who inspired you to see a subject in a whole new light? The Teacher of the Year Award celebrates those who not only share knowledge but also spark curiosity, connect with students, and bring research to life. Meet the finalists for 2025!

How can formative assessment be used to promote teacher professional learning? This book contains various studies into professionalization approaches and courses in which formative assessment is used with a view to teacher learning.

What practical knowledge do mentor teachers have of adaptive mentoring and of individual differences between student teachers?

Does student and teacher gender affect students’ performance and what is the role of gender stereotypes in this relation?

Professional learning communities are useful for professionalization but also for the development of induction programmes. In this project, we combine these two worlds into a professional learning communities in which mentors or novice teachers learn about mentoring and at the same time develop an induction…

Contact us about initial teacher education, educational research and teacher professional development

How to make educational innovations practical for teachers

Many teachers in secondary education take differences between pupils into account . PhD research by Saskia Stollman (ICLON) shows that they need room to experiment and the support of the school management

The research project focuses on teachers’ learning motivation and learning performance in professional learning activities.

The aim of this thesis was to develop and evaluate a Ecological Professional Development Model to support preservice biology teachers to direct their own subject-specific ecological professional development route.

What are ‘missing links’ in research on teacher professional development trajectories? We focus on the role and development of teacher facilitators in designing and implementing (collaborative) professional development trajectories.

How is collaborative learning in teacher education designed and implemented? How do students experience those collaborative learning assignments? What aspects of the design and the implementation lead to which perceived learning outcomes?

Each year, the Faculty of Science celebrates exceptional teaching with its annual award. Here you’ll find how the tradition began, how the winner is chosen, and where to explore the lecturers who have earned the title in previous years.

Getting started with active learning & teaching can be as simple as assessing on what is already accomplished. Here are some practical courses of action to begin experimenting with active learning, whether you are a teacher or responsible for the spaces.

This dissertation focuses on teacher professional learning and collaboration in secondary schools.

In this study we aimed to examine teacher learning within a context of collaboration in interdisciplinary teams.

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Didactics

This study looks at the question of how and at what level students in primary teacher education can integrate theory and practice, and how the organisation of their learning environment, focusing especially on mathematics and pedagogy, can contribute to that.

How can collaborative participatory action research by student-teachers and their students enhance student participation, improve educational practices, and generate knowledge about these practices that can be used for improving teacher education as well?

To what extent are university teachers' individual learning paths influenced by their teaching experience, motivation, and conceptions of teaching and learning through educational technology?

Student cooperativeness underlies high quality teacher-student relationships, and has been positively associated with students’ school engagement. Fostering cooperative rather than oppositional student behavior might be especially helpful for protecting at-risk students against academic failure.

Social relationships of students are important. Especially for students with problem behavior. How can a teacher support students in their social relationships via their own interactions with students? A lot, as is shown by a meta-analyses of Hinke Endedijk. She assessed almost 300 studies about teacher-student…

How can we map and foster Dutch secondary teachers’ agency in inclusive education practices?

The research reported in this thesis is concerned with the knowledge development of a small sample of experienced science teachers in the context of a broad innovation in Dutch secondary education, including the introduction of a new syllabus on Public Understanding of Science.

How can we gain insights in the connection between teaching practices and theoretical elaborations of purposes of education?

We organise various activities for high school students and their physics teachers to learn about Astronomy at Leiden University.

How do teachers conceptualise, develop and implement an effective CLIL practice?

The aim of this research is to gain insight into the approaches of learning to teach. Teacher learning processes, feedback in novice-expert interaction and the impact of the interaction are explored.

Assessment of teaching is currently becoming more and more common practice. As such assessment is generally based on complex, qualitative data from multiple sources (e.g., lesson plans, video-taped lessons, written reflections of the teacher on his or her performance), the overall quality of the assessment…

This thesis reports on the influence of induction programs on beginning teachers’ well-being and professional development, and the essential characteristics of an induction program. These topics were explored by means of an interview study and large scale survey study.