The purpose of this formative experiment (Reinking & Bradley, 2008) was to describe the stages of development of an online platform that cultivated the growth of an online community of practice for teaching professionals. One hundred and forty-eight elementary school professionals participated in this study. Relying primarily on qualitative data, an iterative process of data gathering, analysis, and reflection was used prior to, during, and after the implementation of the intervention, LiteracyGrows.org, to describe performance and determine progress toward the pedagogical goal. Qualitative data were coded for recurring themes derived from the following sources: interview data, user-profile information, Google Analytics, email correspondence and open-rates, webinar archives, heat map data, and a researcher reflection journal. Micro-analysis revealed that the success of the intervention was related to the usability and sociability of the platform. It was easy to navigate and appealed to teachers as a social networking tool that was only for education professionals where they could share information and attend live or archived webinars to extend learning. Reflection on a macro-level was used as a tool to further explore LiteracyGrows.org as a model of professional development. Specifically, how it was situated within the larger landscape of professional development and what it offered in terms of alignment between learning theory, epistemology, and model of professional development and communication, worldview, and knowledge. These constructs were important factors to consider in creating a platform for meaningful dialogue and professional growth to take place. LiteracyGrows.org provides the foundation for future research to further explore how online professional platforms can be utilized to make professional development an on-going and sustainable component of support and growth for education professionals. The growth of online professional platforms by educators will also shift the conversation of professional development further away from delivery and more toward meaningful engagement by educators as active participants in their own knowledge construction. Recommendations include the continuation of the discussion of professional development in terms of epistemological alignment. This study highlights disconnect between teachers and their professional development experiences when expectations, perceptions, and understanding of what they are engaging in for growth do not align. Furthermore, reconstructing the way professional development is embedded within practice to better engage the 21st Century teacher using up-to-date technology.

This MFA thesis document investigates the experience of teachers participating in a trainer of trainers (TOT) professional development model in drama-based instruction in K-12 schools. This document explores a two-phase research study in which teachers attended an Advanced Summer Institute and then took on the role of teacher trainer in their school context. The mixed-methods study uses narrative thematic analysis of interview data as well as quantitative scales to describe the experiences of the drama-based instruction teacher trainers. Throughout, this document argues for more effective, sustainable professional development practices that draw on the instructional knowledge of teachers. The findings suggest organizational support largely determines the amount of participation of teacher trainers in their school context. The document concludes with a discussion of how to better support teachers as teacher trainers on their campuses as part of a larger effort to build capacity and sustain ongoing drama-based instructional practice in K-12th grade schools. / text

The purpose of this study was to explore participants’ perceptions of the impact of a cultural proficiency workshop that discussed concepts of race and racism. Moreover, I was interested in understanding the factors and experiences associated with a greater likelihood that people would want to engage in dialogue on race and racism. The literature suggests that when discussions like these are broached, people can often become disinterested and disengaged (Derman-Sparks & Phillips, 1997; Diem & Carpenter, 2012; Singleton & Linton, 2006; Tatum, 1997). Therefore, if it is indeed pertinent for educators to be presented with knowledge that can be critical to student success, it is vital to understand what aspects of the training and what qualities of the participants lend themselves to a higher level of engagement and interest. To research these phenomena, a mixed method study design was employed. School district central office personnel were required to attend a culture proficiency professional development session which covered concepts of race and racism. I surveyed these participants to gather their perceptions about the impact of the training. In addition, several participants were interviewed. To answer the second research question, certain participants were asked to participate in a follow-up interview to determine the qualities and characteristics that created a greater likelihood that these individuals would see the importance of race-based discourse and continue these conversations. Findings suggest that workshop participants perceived that the workshop helped to increase their level of racial awareness and change their behaviors or disposition. However, it was found that additional follow-up was needed to sustain these efforts. They also expressed that these kinds of workshops are essential. For those who were likely to engage in race-based discourse, it was found that these individuals were racially aware, rejected notions of colorblindness, discovered race at a young age, were more likely to attend diverse schools and live in diverse neighborhoods and were likely to have faced discrimination as a person from an oppressed group or due to a close relationship with someone who was. / text

<p>The purpose of this study was to get a better understanding of how newly graduated social workers within the elderly care and the need assessment sector forms a professional identity through a focus on their experience of the socialization process.</p><p>The main questions concerned how work place culture socialized the newly graduated social worker in respect of her or his professional identity.</p><p>The study’s theoretical underpinning lies in Symbolic Interactionism. We have combined focus group interviews with follow-up personal interviews with the aim of deepening to our understanding of the socialization process of social workers and what it means for their professional identities.</p><p>Three main results were generated. First, that a well planned introduction and the teams’ significance to the formation of professional identity were shown to be important. Second that a needs assessment organization with a controlled and standardized professional role were noted to be too restrictive as they allowed little possibility for the new social worker to shape their own ways of working. This was particularly the case where new social workers were unclear about how to go about their work assignment. These results also showed that relation building and dialogue with clients was underemphasised and taken for granted.</p>

This survey addressed the experience of receiving tenure through the personal narratives of Directors of Library and Information Science Schools in the USA. Fifty-five respondents were asked to rank the emphasis of the variables operating in tenure based on their experience. Participants agreed that the granting of autonomy via tenure was an opportunity to exercise academic freedom. With tenure came the responsibility to contribute as a citizen of both the institutional and disciplinary communities of the profession. The most prominent factor in determining tenure and promotion decisions for LIS faculty is demonstration of research productivity through peer reviewed publications: articles, books and conference proceedings. Teaching and service are also important components of academic life. It was found that collaboration underpinned collegiality and created an environment conducive to research. In turn, the stability and collegiality of a tenured position made the institution work as a teaching and learning environment.

This study analyzes the concept of auditor independence and develops a theoretical model for examining an auditor's independence and the methods that can be used to assess, instill and maintain independence. In addition, this research reports the results of an empirical test of a portion of the model. In this work, independence is described as a multifaceted concept that includes both independence in appearance and independence in fact. By incorporating literatures from economics and sociology, relationships between these two forms of independence are developed to show that the observable structures and behaviors of the profession (independence in appearance) form the basis for implying the level of an individual auditor's independence (independence in fact). In this context, independence is operationally defined as: an auditor's perceived right to make audit judgments free from client and firm influences. The model further suggests that the observable structures of the profession form the socialization contexts for an individual's professional development. A survey of newly hired employees from five national accounting firms was conducted to examine the multidimensional aspects of auditor independence and the link between educational socialization processes and professional development. The results provide some support for the theoretical model and provide a basis for refining the linkages between educational socialization and professional development.

The character of the professional socialization experience is a subject of debate in the literature; one of the primary issues being the relative contributions of trainees to the nature of their socializing experience. As crucial as the clinical education experience is to the educational and professional development of medical students, it has received relatively little attention in the literature on professional socialization of physicians. The goals of this research were to understand, from the students' perspective, the character of the first clinical learning experience in the medical school career of a group of medical students and, given the character of that context, the role of student negotiations in their own education and professional socialization. This study employed a symbolic interactionist framework and the data collection methods of participant observation and unstructured interview. The data collection was conducted over a six-week period during which time the researcher experienced along with a group of six medical students their first clinical learning experience. These students perceived the clinical learning environment to be challenging, complex and frequently too busy to easily accommodate their learning needs. They recognized the enormity of their learning task and of their own incompetence. These were the basic perceptions that prompted the students to negotiate their clinical learning experience. Student negotiations took three basic forms: the creation of new learning opportunities, the manipulation of existing learning resources, and interpretation of events and behaviors. Students' negotiations were constrained by the structure of the education program and the students' own assertiveness. The study's findings indicate that the students were active negotiators of the content and the conduct of their own professional education and professional socialization. Even in the face of overwhelming demands on their intellectual and emotional resources, the students expressed their individual and collective intent for their educational experience. The study findings were similar to those of earlier studies of professional socialization, although new behaviors and behaviors inconsistent with those found in previous research were uncovered. Contributions to the literature on professional socialization and to an understanding of this phenomenon were made through the explanation of these inconsistencies.

The setting for this study was the far-flung Department of Defense Dependents Schools (DoDDS) system, comprising some 260 K-12 schools with 140,000 students and 9,000 teachers in 19 foreign countries. The underlying purposes and need for the study hinged on the fact that teacher unionism and teacher professionalism/professionalization of teaching have not been scrutinized to any significant degree in DoDDS. However, these two strands of research must interact ultimately because, if reform is to occur in DoDDS, it will be reform of a unionized system with its own history of collective bargaining that must impact the direction and consequences of reform efforts. The setting, therefore, presented a prime research opportunity. A review of the literature summarized discourse dealing with the dual issues of (1) teacher unionism, its origins, objectives, impact and trends, and (2) teacher professionalism/professionalization of teaching. Q methodology, based on the "science of subjectivity," was the method used to obtain teachers' views regarding the research questions. Q required respondents to sort a set of cards with statements that mirrored a subjected to computer statistical analysis, including correlation and factor analysis. The three factors that emerged were "prototypes" of the respondents' views and became the basis for interpretation of their views. One appeared open to many of the reforms in which unions play a key role; a second that seemed focused on the status quo as guaranteed by the grievance procedure, with possible support for selective changes; and a third that indicated satisfaction with its site-specific situation, while largely oblivious to the push for reform. The three factors generally supported change with teacher unions playing a major role in that change; strongly supported an overhaul of teacher evaluation systems, albeit without suggesting specific alternatives; and strongly disfavored merit pay proposals as part of differentiated staffing options. Several recommendations are suggested for management and unions to pursue within the DoDDS system if current reform objectives are to be implemented in the DoD school system. These include (1) pursuit of the unionism-reform nexus, based on the factors' general openness to union-led or supported reform; (2) movement toward school-site participatory initiatives, as first steps are made in this direction; and (3) seeking alternatives to supplant or supplement current evaluation practices. In summary, attitudes and conditions within the DoDDS appear conducive for implementation or adaptation of current reform proposals that seek to promote teacher professsionalism and professionalization of teaching. Further research might also fruitfully focus on ascertaining teacher receptivity toward more specific and concrete reform initiatives in the DoD school system.

The issue of occupational stress in nurses is significant because it has been associated with absenteeism, burnout and turnover among nurses. This study was an attempt to illuminate the occupational stress experience of workers in general with a focus upon nurses as subjects. Consequently, this research evaluated multiple contributory components to this stress process. Further, consideration of the fit between this stress-coping-depression model and General Systems Theory was another major focus of this study. The independent variables of daily hassles, occupational stress, primary stress appraisal, coping strategies, social support, repression and extraversion were measured in an attempt to determine their combined and singular influence upon the dependent variable of professional depression. These variables were measured by means of a paper-and-pencil self-report inventory of questionnaires mailed to a random sample of six hundred registered nurses in the state of Arizona. Analyses of returned questionnaires consisted of regression analyses of a causal model of the above noted variables. The findings indicate that emotion-focused coping strategies, especially escape avoidance and distancing strategies, demonstrated the most consistently significant effect upon depression for the total sample as well as for all of the demographic subgroups. The next most significant variable measured in this study was that of social support. This variable demonstrated an inverse relationship to depression and thereby appears to provide protection from depression when an individual is exposed to external stressors. External stressors, especially the daily hassles subscales of work, and time pressures, were also significantly related to increased depression in most of the analyses. Occupational stress, on the other hand, as measured revealed a statistically significant relationship to depression for only two subsamples of the study population, charge nurse/clinical specialists and nurses who had worked in nursing longer than 20 years. In regard to stress appraisal, the aspects of threat and stressfulness both revealed significant relationships. The appraisal of threat was significantly related to depression while stressfulness revealed influences upon both external stressors of daily hassles and occupational stress as well as upon depression.

This case study examined the evolution of a partnership between a middle school mathematics teacher and a university researcher around discussions on the content and teaching of mathematics. In particular, the study sought to examine the evolution of the partnership, the constraints present for the teacher and researcher, the impact of the partnership on the mathematical and pedagogical issues that arose in planning, teaching, and assessment, and the impact on the tasks that the teacher chose and implemented in the classroom. Drawing from the literature on collaborations and the emergent perspective, the evolution of the partnership occurred through three stages, determined by the content-teaching tensions. The first stage focused on the mathematics content, with the agenda being set and run by the researcher. The second stage gave rise to the content-teaching tensions as the teacher shifted the discussions from content to a focus on lesson planning and teaching. Tensions were resolved in the third stage with the teacher taking a proactive role in the discussions of lesson design and teaching. The mathematical issues in planning and teaching reflected the shift in the partnership where in the beginning the discussions focused on the mathematical content, later discussions centered on a combination of content, pedagogy, and student thinking. The assessment discussions addressed differences between the language of the curriculum and the district and state tests.The shift in the partnership can be attributed to the teacher's choice of high level mathematics tasks, the subsequent adoption of a conceptually based mathematics curriculum and the effective management of the dialectic tensions by both partners. This study illustrated that generating perturbations and effective management of dialectical tensions has the potential for a fruitful collaboration between teachers and researchers.