The purpose of this study included systematically identifying commonalities in the leadership qualities of successful principals, analyzing the relationships among these qualities, and studying how the qualities vary and interact across school contexts. This study explored how successful principals acquire and apply these qualities to achieve…

Overlapping and entangled crises that comprise and propel society require near constant (re)orientation in order to understand, explain, and address the workings of a multiplicitous world. For those invested in education, this means confronting complexity through the prism of teaching and learning. Educational scholars across fields and…

Many believe that teacher leaders can positively impact a school system, lifting the level of student achievement as well as cultivating a positive professional culture of learning (Carver & Feiman-Nemser, 2009; Lieberman & Miller, 2004; Nolan & Palazzolo, 2011; York-Barr & Duke, 2004). Drawing on the researcher's own lived journey…

The role of school principal, often deemed crucial for school success, is under strain due to high stress levels, isolation, and demanding responsibilities, especially in high-poverty districts, leading to a significant turnover rate. This study employed a mixed methods approach, involving an electronic questionnaire completed by 156 principals,…

Principals' experiences in rural schools often differ from that of their urban and suburban counterparts. They often experience challenges that are not only unique to their specific contexts but influence their roles as instructional leaders. With instructional leadership at the forefront of the principalship, it is important to explore how rural…

This qualitative case study explored the perceptions of instructional coaches in order to understand the ways in which context influenced their view of their roles and how they supported teacher growth. The theoretical and conceptual foundations for this study include a distributed perspective, a phenomenologically informed lens, and a pragmatic…

The purpose of this study was to extend Feuerstein et al.'s (2006, 2010, 2015) theories of structural cognitive modifiability and mediated learning experience to the homeschool context by constructing a grounded theory that explains how families create mediated learning experiences for learners with special educational needs and disabilities in a…

Teacher Leadership has been advanced as a solution to numerous educational issues faced such as ineffective professional learning and school improvement. However, not much is known about how teacher leadership can be nurtured through in-service professional learning programs. Utilizing survey, document analysis, and semi-structured individual…

Women make up the majority of degree earners and a majority of those teaching at higher education institutions. Yet, women are not advancing to the highest ranks. How female faculty receive credit for the work that they do make account for the discrepancy in women advancing to the highest ranks. This single institution convergent mixed methods…

This dissertation furthers the research on racial mismatch by examining principals' perception of influence and teachers' perspectives of principal competence and support with a critical perspective. This study uses regression and fixed-effects models. In addition, a new critical interpretive framework was developed to analyze these findings. I…

Scalar inference, the process by which we infer meanings stronger than what was explicitly said, has long been a central topic of investigation in theoretical semantics-pragmatics, as well as in psycholinguistics. Upon encountering the sentence "Mary ate some of the deep dish", for instance, hearers regularly compute the pragmatic…

The number of international students that travel abroad for their tertiary education has increased dramatically in the last twenty years. Responding to this increase in international student demand and internal motivations for prestige and financial resources, universities in the US have developed international enrollment management offices to…

Intro. A full account of speech perception requires explaining how listeners organize the acoustic signal into speech objects (perceptual organization) and how listeners use their memory for language to impart meaning to the speech objects (linguistic memory). Traditionally these mechanisms have been investigated separately, and thus theorized as…

This descriptive case study investigates how full-time community college curriculum faculty members perceive and navigate professional development in their community college. Community college faculty teach nearly two-thirds of all undergraduate students in the United States and have a significant impact on the success of their students.…

The purpose of this interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA) study was to garner a greater understanding of professional counselors' experiences and understandings of the role and boundary changes in their personal relationships following counselor education and preparation. Additionally and interrelatedly, professional counselors'…