Principal Vanessa Sanchez assumed leadership of a high-need, high-poverty urban school with a mandate from the district superintendent to change the school culture and to build an instructional team aligned to the principal's theory of change. The central dilemma of the case is how to lead organizational change while managing interpersonal…

Students' academic achievement is the result of the interplay between person-level and contextual factors (R. R: Greene, 2014; D. E. Hunt, 1975). Students perform better when classroom characteristics support their characteristics. The authors examine whether student perceptions of two classroom characteristics (care and control) fit with two…

Students' academic achievement is the result of the interplay between person-level and contextual factors (R. R: Greene, 2014; D. E. Hunt, 1975). Students perform better when classroom characteristics support their characteristics. The authors examine whether student perceptions of two classroom characteristics (care and control) fit with two…

Technology use in high-minority, low-income middle school ELA classrooms is defined by traditional instructional practices (Applebee & Langer, 2013; Attewell, 2001; Boser, 2013; Cuban, 2001; Lankshear & Knobel, 2008), barriers to access (O'Dwyer et al., 2005; Purcell et al., 2013; Warschauer & Matuchniak, 2010), and inequalities in use…

Starting from a person-environment fit framework, this study investigates whether ethnic congruence--the percentage of co-ethnics in a school--relates to school misconduct and whether congruence effects differ between ethnic minority and majority students. Moreover, we investigate whether eventual associations are mediated by friendship…

Adolescents typically like school less after making age-graded school transitions. Stage-environment fit theory (Eccles & Midgley, 1989) attributes this to a mismatch between developmental needs and new school environments. Our in vivo study provides a basis for future quantitative designs by uncovering the most prevalent stage-environment…

The purpose of this study is to examine the relationship of middle school students' perceptions of the ideal science student to their problem solving activity and conceptual understanding in the applied science area of robotics. Twenty-six 11 and 12 year-olds (22 boys) attending a summer camp for academically advanced students participated in the…

Effective leadership in public schools includes, but is not limited to being able to communicate goals, set expectations, monitor instructional progress, coordinate the curriculum, and supervise and evaluate faculty (Snowden & Gorton, 2002). All of these leadership skills are driven by a need for leaders to build collaborative rapport and…

Personality type concepts have been introduced at Anwatin Middle School, an urban middle school in Minneapolis, Minnesota, where nearly two-thirds of the students receive reduced price or free lunches. In Anwatin's diverse climate--approximately 70% of Anwatin's students are students of color, mostly Black and Hmong--looking at personality…

The author offers an analysis of the failures and insights she experienced working with adolescents at a progressive school while discussing how the students understood and experienced race and identity -- their own and that of others. While she encountered students who were willing to take her into their worlds, her efforts fell flat when her…