In 2013 the Iowa Teacher Leadership and Compensation planning grant (TLC) committed to providing 150 million dollars annually toward rewarding effective teachers with leadership opportunities and higher pay, attracting promising new teachers with competitive starting salaries, and fostering greater collaboration for all teachers to learn from one…

The origins of the American educational system have always included a character education component. Teaching students moral values and the ability to know right from wrong is a component of the educational mission of our society. Character education evolved over the centuries, yet the core values of implementing right from wrong and the necessity…

Professional development (PD) is often viewed as essential to improve classroom practices--as a way to create changes in districts, changes in classrooms, and changes in teachers--which, in turn, strives to improve student learning. Many insist that for a PD initiative to be successful, it needs to create changes in teachers' classroom practices,…

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to explore the perceptions of master teachers, administrators, and teacher trainers about the content of Student Evaluations of Teachers (SET) in California high schools. This study also sought to reach a consensus among experts concerning how SETs can be used both in teacher evaluations and in professional…

No one would disagree that young children's literacy learning is of primary importance in the early childhood years. One of the best ways for children to learn oral language is through play. However, many teachers view play as a child's work and not as a space where the teacher can support children's literacy learning. This study investigated the…

The purpose of this study was to gain essence of understanding of the phenomena of the influence of culture on the change process at small, private colleges. Research questions included cultural characteristics of a campus, the impact of policy and procedure on shaping culture, the role of leadership in shaping culture, and contextual conditions…

Students today can enter classrooms lacking the social and emotional skills needed to achieve academic and behavioral success in school. As the need for the classroom-based social and emotional interventions and supports grow, the need to identify the perceptions of teachers involved in the identification and implementation of these interventions…

For decades, discussions regarding assessment have been taking place in higher education, which has forced institutions to take a look at outcomes and indicators of student achievement. Although the literature indicates an acceptance that assessment is not going away, the process that takes place within higher education institutions has led to…

Early identification and intervention for struggling readers increased the likelihood of students identified as proficient; ultimately leading to future success. The researcher sought to evaluate the Leveled Literacy Intervention (LLI) program in a Midwest urban school district, to help close the achievement gap between students' reading levels…

How educational leaders initiate and sustain change is often hotly debated by those inside and outside of the system. Given the many reform initiatives of the past 30 years, and the resulting changes public educators have made lurching from initiative to initiative, one must ask if public education has truly improved. The answer to why public…

The flipped classroom has been implemented within the nursing curricula to promote increased student classroom satisfaction, student engagement in the classroom, and improve retention of complex nursing concepts. This research study evaluated how the implementation of the flipped classroom contributed to the overall perception of a new…

Competency-based education (CBE) has become well-accepted as a powerful way to personalize learning. Today's advanced technologies have enhanced CBE even further. Practitioners in the field are seeking means to take advantage of technology to increase CBE's effectiveness and efficiency, especially for adult learners. Microlearning and digital open…

Conflict is a substantial, pervasive activity in team collaboration. It may arise because of differences in goals, differences in ways of working, or interpersonal dissonance. The specific focus for this research is the conflict in distributed teams. As opposed to traditional teams, participants of distributed teams are geographically dispersed…

This retrospective multiple case study examined the extent to which elements of Wagner's 4Cs framework (competencies, conditions, context, and Culture) were perceived as present during the implementation of the teacher evaluation system (TEVAL) at two urban magnet high schools during the 2014-2015 school year. The overarching research question was…

Recent innovations in teacher evaluation include the development of standards-based frameworks for observational evaluations of teacher practice and development of test-based measures of teacher effectiveness. These tools raise questions about how best to identify good teaching, about the roles of both evaluations and principals in improving…