The purpose of this study is to investigate the relationship between different levels of organizational commitment (compliance, identification, internalization) of teachers and their different conflict management strategies (compromising, problem solving, forcing, yielding, avoiding). Based on a questionnaire survey of 418 teachers, this study…

Using a message interpretation perspective, this study (N = 379) examined how sex of the student, sex of the teacher, and the setting affect the messages students receive from a teacher's excessive use of immediacy. Results reveal that students interpret excessive immediacy from female teachers as caring, but the same behavior from male teachers…

MySpace and Facebook are innovative digital communication tools that surpass traditional means of social interaction. However, in some instances in which educators have used these tools, public reactions to them have resulted in sanctions. With the notion that traditional ideas of privacy and teacher conduct are not yet defined in online worlds,…

Understanding the ideas of chaos theory and spectra of teachers' beliefs about literacy provides an additional method of examining, organizing, and interpreting the complex research findings in the area of literacy teachers' thought processes. Historically, research paradigms in the area of teacher thought processes have ranged from the…

A study analyzed the choreography of turn-taking and cohesion in classroom computer-mediated communication (CMC) to assess its efficacy as a linguistic intervention. Of the kinds of discussions made possible by CMC, it is the pseudonymous, synchronous conversation that most attracts those who would aspire to the project of changing linguistic…

The nature and evolution of one preservice secondary teacher's beliefs about mathematics are described in this paper. It provides information on how the teacher's conceptions about mathematics, teaching, and learning evolved during a secondary methods course and student teaching. The teacher communicated narrow views about the nature of…

A study examined the extent to which reported familiarity, reported utility, and perceived applicability of content area reading strategies were related to teaching in the primary grades. A total of 68 first- through third-grade teachers representing 6 elementary schools in 2 districts responded to the Content Area Questionnaire. Frequency…

A study investigated the association between affinity-seeking strategies and teacher liking. Data were collected from 251 undergraduate students at the middle of the semester and 178 undergraduate students at the end of the semester on the behavior of an equal number of instructors. Respondents were asked to assess their chosen instructor's…

A study examined how reading teachers' reading habits impacted their teaching practices. Subjects, 625 teachers who attended the Book and Author Luncheon at the 1993 International Reading Association in San Antonio, completed a survey. Teachers represented all 50 states and Canada. Results indicated that: (1) the majority of the teachers viewed…

Built on preliminary findings emerging from an ongoing research project, this paper examines student grouping practices from an institutional-theory perspective. The study, based on interviews with 10 teachers, examines how teachers explain their reasons for grouping students and how they account for their grouping actions. The majority base their…

This paper reviews recent research concerning the relationship between teachers' theoretical orientation about reading and their reading instructional practices. The paper first describes three major clusters of theoretical reading instructional approaches: phonics orientation, skills orientation, and whole language orientation. It then reviews…

Four teachers at Fort Lewis College, Colorado, use humor to send messages which "leap frog" resistance to the new and different, and go directly to the preconscious. The power in these humorous conceptual leaps is that the entering information sticks to the anger and passions of the human psyche, thus fostering retention. Linda Mack, a…

Focusing on suggestions about selecting media for use by teachers, this paper summarizes a follow-up qualitative research study on a seventh grade teacher's approach to the selection of print and non-print media and presents a revised critical schema for such selection. The paper notes that the follow-up study indicated that the expression of…

Kenneth Burke's Dramatism, as a "meta-perspective," encourages a liberating awareness of the shortcomings of all rhetorics by upholding a "comic frame" that exhorts commitment without dogmatism, tolerance without uncritical relativism. Teachers of rhetoric can use a liberating comic frame that acknowledges the recalcitrance of…

The purpose of this study was to investigate the effect of high versus low teacher affect and active versus passive student activities during music listening on high school students' attending behavior. Ninth-, 10th-, 11th-, and 12th-grade general music students (N=26) from two different high schools participated in four short listening lessons.…