While school closures resulting from the pandemic in spring 2020 created challenges for every school district, districts serving predominantly rural communities faced even greater obstacles. Lack of access to broadband internet connectivity in rural and remote areas complicated many students' efforts to participate in remote learning. In addition,…

School leaders are continually looking for ways to improve instruction and increase student achievement. Collective teacher efficacy has shown to have a high effect size on student learning. However, as educators focus on building collective teacher efficacy and helping students, these same teachers may not be completely engaged in their work.…

Trends in teacher education increasingly emphasize the need for quality ongoing teacher professional development that is accessible, flexible, fosters advanced skillset development, and has the power to change teachers' practice. Participatory approaches to learning that are situated, collaborative, dialogic, and inquiry-oriented promote the…

The aim of the study was to test the effect of teachers' professional development upon students' mathematics academic achievement levels with the help of lesson study. In this manner, the study aimed at increasing students' mathematics learning levels via lesson study. Action research was used as research method in the study. The sample of the…

The number of English Language Learners in the United States continues to increase, yet the number of teachers trained to support ELLs does not. The lack of expertise in this area could have a negative impact on academic achievement. Teachers across the nation, including those at Driscoll Middle, a mid-size suburban middle school in the…

This dissertation in practice created a new form of educator development called the Virtual Educator Network (VEN) and examined its impact on educators' attitudes towards inclusion, feelings of support, and incorporation of new strategies to solve problems of practice they find important. The VEN is a form of professional development that pulls…

This Dissertation in Practice (DIP) was a group dissertation as required by the Doctorate in Educational Leadership program and created a new form of educator development called the Virtual Educator Network (VEN). This DIP examined the VENs' impact on educators' attitudes towards inclusion, feelings of support, and incorporation of new strategies…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to explore the merits of lesson study (LS) as a research approach for research in (science) education. A lesson was developed to introduce students to model-based reasoning: a higher order thinking skill that is seen as one of the major reasoning strategies in science. Design/methodology/approach: Participants…

This project looked at faculty accounts of emotional experiences in the workplace. Specifically, this project examined how faculty in higher education spoke about emotions and teaching, the ways emotional labor manifested itself in higher education faculty, and the relationship between emotions and the environment. Participants (?n = 90) were…

Georgia's College and Career Ready Performance Index for 2014-2016 showed that students with disabilities (SwD) did not meet performance targets when taught in co-taught inclusion classrooms with both general education teachers (GET) and special education teachers (SET) in the classrooms. The purpose of this study was to determine the differences…

This qualitative single-subject case study investigated teachers' perceptions of what motivates them to pursue professional development. The research focused on one school district in New Jersey with participants from elementary, middle, and high schools. The district administrator in charge of professional development was also interviewed.…

The burgeoning research on contemporary educator movements provides insight into what activist educators know and believe, what they learn through their collective organizing and activism, and how they conduct inquiry to generate new knowledge for praxis. Yet, although this work suggests that these educators engage, generate, circulate, and…

To accelerate literacy learning for upper-elementary multilingual children designated as English learners (ML-ELs), teachers need instructional tools that create sustained opportunities for reading and discussing informational texts, examining the language encountered in those texts, and building new content knowledge. To address this need, we…

The past decades have witnessed an increasing number of studies documenting native English teachers' (NETs') challenges in professional development and collaboration with nonnative English teachers' (NNETs') across multiple educational contexts. There are also debates in TESOL regarding the essentialized dichotomy of NETs and NNETs with…

The COVID-19 pandemic led to an urgent need for professional development (PD) experiences to support teacher learning across hybrid and digital contexts. This study investigates teachers' experiences in a Virtual Pivot, a PD workshop designed to support computational thinking integration into disciplinary teaching. Participants were 151 middle and…