An ongoing concern in higher education is the disjunction between how faculty teach and how students learn best. A primary objective of higher education is to produce content experts, which does not automatically translate to expert teachers of content. Lacking formal instruction on how to teach their content, faculty often teach in the same…

The globally shared pandemic experience forced schools to shut their doors and required communities to examine their education systems. An important part of that examination is the evaluation of online learning education options. Online K-12 learning continues to grow, so examining how it can work better for students is important. This…

The significant benefits to students of working collaboratively with faculty, increasingly conceptualized as Students as Partners (SaP), and focused on aspects of teaching and learning through pedagogical partnerships, are well documented, yet these practices typically occur on a small scale. SaP practitioners and scholars have proposed SaP as a…

Experiential learning is a child-centered approach to education designed to minimize the role of authority, shift the power dynamic away from the teacher, and place children at the center in curriculum activities. In direct instruction, teachers play a leading role in constructing and delivering lessons to students. Direct instruction occurs when…

In today's context of schooling, most teaching is aimed at output, coverage, and high scores which is in direct contrast to what pre-service teachers are taught to cherish -- differentiation, academic choice, and student autonomy. However, there is an approach that shows promise in counteracting the tendency to over stress scores and undermine a…

Across the nation, incoming first-year undergraduates enter the university with a major that they selected before they had any lived-experiences as a college student. With more students changing their major than keeping the one they initially enrolled with, an inequity arises between those students whose pre-college experiences prepare them to…

Students in high-performing high schools often suffer from a constellation of stressors related to expectations such as good grades, number of Advanced Placement and honors classes, and successful admission to college. Critics have cast this method of educating students as outdated and more akin to a factory model. As a result, some educators have…

This study addressed the problem of identifying challenges and expectations when a school transitions from traditional education to personalized learning. The single case study used semi-structured interviews to discover the experiences and thoughts of ten teachers and staff members from a rural high school that transitioned. The school was in its…

This dissertation aims to gain further knowledge about the implementation of the Critically Compassionate Intellectualism (CCI; Cammarota & Romero, 2003) framework in teacher education. This framework, originally developed to provide a better education for Latine students who were being silenced in their original schools, emphasizes authentic…

This study examines how teacher leaders across the Central Valley support the implementation of the English Language Roadmap Policy (ELRP) utilizing a qualitative, multi-case study approach. Relying on semi-structured interviews and a series of project presentations, this study examines teacher leaders' perceptions and identifies the attributes of…

This study utilized a basic qualitative design and Burns's transformational leadership theory, Crenshaw's intersectionality theory, and Collins's Black feminist theory to examine African American women in senior academic leadership positions at predominantly White institutions (PWIs) who have experienced gender, racial, and/or organizational bias…

Novice public-school principals face tremendous external pressures (e.g., high-stakes accountability, market forces, legitimization) and internal pressures (e.g., identity (re)construction, identity verification, authenticity) in the enactment of their role as a novice principal. These pressures converge in the dissonance of competing values,…

This dissertation explores the integration of Place-Based Scientific Inquiry (PBSI) into science education through participatory design-based professional development for instructors at Sky School, an outdoor education program in southern Arizona. PBSI emphasizes student-centered, inquiry-driven, experiential learning grounded in outdoor contexts.…

The required literature (frequently referred to as "the canon") taught in the secondary English Language Arts curriculum often focuses on the "classics," which do not always connect to modern students or reflect their identities. This study sought to investigate how the ELA canon could be adapted to better reflect students'…

This qualitative case study investigated the implementation of the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) by sixth-grade teachers in diverse educational settings within the Central Valley of California. The research focused on identifying the practical successes and ongoing challenges faced by educators in elementary and middle school…