A study developed a valid and reliable instrument to measure learner empowerment and tested a model in which learner empowerment was caused by teacher communication behaviors and students' self-esteem. The model tested hypothesized teacher communication behaviors (relevance, verbal immediacy, and nonverbal immediacy) and student self-esteem as…

Many states have a disconnected body of laws regarding educator evaluation. Uncoordinated legislation can create problems with respect to evaluation, appropriate standards and methods to be employed, and implementation strategies. This paper describes Utah's educator-evaluation legislation to illustrate this phenomenon. Four statutory provisions…

This guidebook provides a general overview of procedures that may be followed in staff misconduct situations. Following the preface and introduction, part 1 contains four chapters that present information on general misconduct procedures, serious misconduct requiring immediate suspension, the presentation of a case at a hearing, and misconduct…

A follow-up study to Stanford University's Teacher Assessment Project (TAP) investigated captioning as a means of making sense of portfolios and explored how the captioning process might provide a way to use student portfolios to link student assessment and teacher assessment. Each of four teachers (three third grade and one fourth grade) from the…

Designed for adult educators in various settings who are seeking to improve as teachers, this book describes a process adult educators can use to examine their beliefs about teaching and current teaching behavior in depth. It is intended to guide them through an exploration of who they really are as teachers, and then, through experiential…

Using a sociocultural framework to generalize principles about how to work within an emergent reader's zone of proximal development, this study analyzed teacher support and forms of teacher prompts in one-on-one Reading Recovery tutorials with first-grade students at risk of reading failure. The ways that five Reading Recovery teachers supported…

A second-grade teacher wanted to enable her students to look at several pieces of their own writing, pick the best piece, and write an explanation as to why it was chosen. She began by developing a series of probing questions that the students could ask themselves as they evaluated their own writing. So that students could fully understand the…

A study examined the concerns, problems, and experiences when teachers change from a traditional skills classroom to a whole language classroom. Subjects, 162 of 400 K-12 teachers from several Ohio Teachers Applying Whole Language groups, responded to a questionnaire (for a return rate of 40%). Results indicated that: (1) the most important…

The portfolio approach to teaching writing brings the writing process into the classroom and enables the new teacher--and all teachers--to see writing from a new perspective, to truly be collaborators and coaches with their students. A college writing teacher uses portfolios and plays the role of evaluator as well as the responder in three courses…

Except in small doses, the language and literature of Native Americans remains invisible in the American school curriculum. Undergraduate literature classes fail to offer works by Native Americans just as the undergraduate curriculum offers few courses in Native American literature. Graduate schools frequently define minority literature as…

A continuing longitudinal study examined students' perceptions of their learning and motivation in a whole language classroom setting. Subjects, 14 fifth- or sixth-grade students who collaborated in the inquiry as co-researchers, were interviewed in depth. The mixed fifth- and sixth-grade classroom at the "Willow School" in southern…

Although "flaming" (language and behavior considered outrageous in a classroom context) is a rupture of teacher authority, it can be used in the classroom as a viable pedagogical tool. A student in a basic literature course read a long and sexually explicit narrative in rhymed couplets. The rupture in the normal classroom environment…

A practicum was designed to assist 30 kindergarten teachers in increasing the authentic reading experiences of kindergarten students in their classrooms. The goal of the practicum was two-fold: to provide the teachers with alternative instructional strategies to drill and practice basic reading skills; and to provide adequate, developmentally…

That the emergent literacy perspective is gaining influence in the United States as a way of studying children's literacy acquisition. This report interprets emergent literacy research in light of the Vygotskian theory of learning and development. First, the report compares the emergent literacy perspective to the more traditional reading…

This paper describes the case of Cassandra Singer, a third-grade teacher finishing her first year of using Comprehensive School Mathematics Program (CSMP), an innovative mathematics curriculum. Drawing from interviews and observations, the document explores relationships between Cassandra's knowledge and beliefs about mathematics, how it is taught…