The purpose of this qualitative collective case study was to explore current paraprofessional training programs offered to support paraprofessionals working with students with disabilities (SWDs), including both pre-service and in-service training. Specifically, this study evaluated training offered by local school districts within Southern…

With the drastic change in societal needs over the past several decades, there is no surprise that creativity has become a subject of heightened interest to the field of teaching (Plucker, et al., 2004). This qualitative study investigated the meaning of creative experiences according to K-6 administrators and teachers. This research aims to draw…

Georgia established the Dual Enrollment Accelerated Career Diploma (ACD) program in 2015 to address its skilled trades workforce shortage (Dual Enrollment Act, 2015: Williams, 2015). ACD allows high school students to earn their diplomas by replacing several of their graduation-required credits with technical college credentials earned through…

There is a gap in research focusing on how leaders implement complex policies such as Response to Intervention/Multitiered Systems of Support (RTI/MTSS). Response to Intervention/Multitiered Systems of Support (RTI/MTSS). To address this gap, this phenomenological case study examined school leaders' perceptions of their roles as leaders…

This qualitative case study provided insight into the effectiveness of rural school leaders' implementation practices during the COVID-19 pandemic. This study addressed the need for knowledge regarding school administrators' and educators' perspectives on the practice changes necessitated by the COVID-19 pandemic. This qualitative case study aimed…

Literacy coaches serve in a multitude of roles and play a critical role in bridging district and school priorities (Walpole and Blamey, 2008; Steckel, 2009). Currently, coaches and teachers are navigating a national policy shift to Science of Reading (SoR) aligned instruction, and educators want more than a new curriculum (Schwartz, 2022). This…

Campus administrators and practitioners must make sense of state policy and system-level initiatives for successful implementation. This qualitative study examined campus administrators' and student health and well-being practitioners' sensemaking of the University System of Georgia's (USG) Mental Health Initiative (MHI) through interviews with…

The term "equity" is commonly used in education discourse as a goal of educational improvement efforts. Yet, the term can be conceptualized in many ways, and equity conceptions are rarely interrogated in policy studies (Bulkley, 2013; Jencks, 1988; Levinson et al., 2022). Still, equity conceptions reflect an underlying ideology and…

In this autoethnographically-infused natural history of discourse (NHD) (Silverstein and Urban, 1996; Slembrouck, 2001), I use methods from critical discourse studies (CDS) to trace 10 years of changes in "remediation" discourses within a corpus of texts associated with Missouri HB 1042, a piece of legislation passed in 2012 that…

State governments are regularly reexamining the statewide board governance arrangements over public higher education, enacting governance reforms that change the structure or authority granted to boards by state legislatures. While previous research has studied governance reforms, there is a lack of recent studies on such reforms and what…

The issue that this study addresses is the lack of implementation of Social Emotional Learning (SEL) in today's classrooms. To address this problem, the purpose of this study will be exploring the experience of students positively impacted by a teacher coded as using Social Emotional Competence. To gather data, assessment scores of several…

Recent teacher supervision and evaluation system (TSES) reform efforts have resulted in wide adoption of policies targeting improvements in teaching quality and student outcomes; however, impact of these policies has been inconsistent (Hazi, 2019; Stecher et al., 2018). Failure of TSES efforts to realize their intended outcomes is the result of…

Most higher education institutions in the United States are bound to the triad's regulations, but their methods for integrating external policies with internal ones are unstudied. Employing a single-case, embedded design, this qualitative study centers on a midsize public, research institution in the eastern United States to explore how one higher…

The purpose of this study was to understand the perceptions of middle school principals or Social Emotional Learning (SEL) program designees on the implementation practices of SEL programs at their school sites. Adolescents in grades sixth through eighth experience diverse changes that are physical, social, and emotional in nature given their…

The problem in the current basic qualitative study was that elementary principals were challenged to implement a district-mandated educational equity policy. The purpose of this qualitative study was to explore elementary principals' experiences implementing a district-mandated educational equity policy. The conceptual framework for this study was…