Student demographics in K–12 education have changed dramatically over the past few decades. Classrooms are increasingly more linguistically, culturally, and racially diverse than ever before, yet our educator workforce remains predominantly white. Moreover, racial and cultural opportunity gaps continue to widen. In this ethnographic case study, the researcher studies one school’s process for becoming a more culturally responsive community. Through semi-structured interviews, field notes, and surveys, the researcher describes what happened after the school launched an Equity Team consisting of six educators who played the role of lead learners and professional development facilitators for the staff at large. The researcher found that the educators willing to join the Equity Team shared specific characteristics and beliefs. He also found that while Equity Team members focused carefully on the content they wanted to present, they were not as deliberate about their facilitation strategy and response to conflict. Moreover, he found those educators who participated in the professional development demonstrated changes in their understanding of cultural responsiveness, although sometimes in surprising ways. Through the lenses of culturally responsive teaching, transformational learning and racial identity development, the researcher offers implications and recommendations about the design and implementation of future professional development on culturally responsive teaching.

The ever-changing cultural diversity of the student population necessitates shifts in schooling. For too long schools have been aggressive and unconnected spaces for students of color. This critical narrative case study will explore and understand how one independent school engages in the diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) work to create space for its member voices and experiences. This dissertation study included document analysis, narrative interviews, and a focus group to uncover an in-depth overview of the interactional dynamics of one school site through an oral history and narrative of its members. Findings highlight how the tenets of cultural humility, including critical self-reflection, mitigating power dynamics, and mutually sustaining partnerships play out at the school. An emergent theme indicated the role of learning how to navigate spaces, experienced by parents, was also important as the school engaged in DEI work.

Higher education institutions are increasingly turning to adjunct faculty to teach online courses to accommodate online course enrollment growth. While many adjunct faculty are attracted to the flexibility of online teaching, they also face several challenges, such as feelings of isolation and disengagement, negative stereotypes, and lack of professional development opportunities. These challenges can be detrimental to their instructional performance and, therefore, the student learning experience. Thus, fully integrating online adjunct faculty into an institution’s community and creating an environment in which they feel supported is critical to the success of an institution’s online programs. Research suggests that higher education administrators are responsible for fostering a sense of community among online adjunct faculty, yet their approaches to fulfilling this responsibility remain largely unknown. Hence, the purpose of this study was to learn more about the strategies higher education administrators use to cultivate community among online adjunct faculty. Data were generated and analyzed using a constructivist grounded theory approach to understand the practices, influences, and challenges of 17 higher education administrators from different 4-year public and private institutions who reported fostering a sense of community among online adjunct faculty. Results indicated that the participants fostered a sense of community through intentional inclusion, operationalized by four interconnected processes: socialization, communication, participation, and recognition. Multiple contextual factors and challenges influenced participants’ community-building practices. The findings from this study provide a framework for creating inclusive working environments for online adjunct faculty and recommendations for further research to explore their nature and efficacy.

The purpose of this program evaluation was to examine teachers’ perceptions of their current skills in implementing Multi-Tiered System of Supports (MTSS) interventions at one public charter school in Denver. The problem addressed in this study was the inhibiting conditions to implementing small-group instruction and Khan Academy interventions in the classroom. The findings of this study contribute to the existing literature on providing quality professional development training on MTSS programming to staff, offering ongoing instructional coaching and feedback to ensure data-driven instructional strategies, and protecting collaboration time for teachers by creating professional learning communities. This mixed methods study incorporated staff surveys and teacher interviews, which revealed staff perceiving themselves as having minimal skills in collecting different types of data and needing more substantial support in this area. Progress monitoring and formal data collection on student growth during small-group instructional interventions were found to be inconsistent. Time, student buy-in, and progress monitoring student learning were found to be barriers to successful implementation of small-group instruction. The interviewed teachers perceived the instructional videos and questions from Khan Academy as not always aligning with the ways in which they taught and assessed content knowledge. In addition, the Coronavirus pandemic made it more challenging for teachers to find time to implement Khan Academy in instruction. Consequently, the teachers used different online platforms that are better tailored to students’ instructional needs. The findings of this study may be used to inform and support high school building leaders in creating professional development trainings, ongoing coaching support, and collaboration days that better support teachers in implementing MTSS instructional interventions with fidelity. It is hoped that this will lead to more successful outcomes for high school students.

In the last few decades, classical education has greatly expanded across the United States. The philosophical roots of classical education span over 2,000 years of history, yet very little educational research has focused on these ever-expanding schools. The purpose of this quantitative study was to explore the relationship between implicit beliefs related to creativity and the uses of instructional practices related to creative thinking among classical school teachers. This study used quantitative research methods including exploratory factor analysis, multiple regression analysis, and bivariate correlations to establish a research basis for the importance of facilitating creativity, imagination, and wonder in classical school students. Study findings indicate that classical school teachers tend to hold democratic beliefs about creative potential, value creative thinking, and commonly utilize several instructional practices conducive to facilitating creative thinking ability in students. Research findings offer support for training and further professional learning to better assist classical educators in their ability to use creative thinking instructional practices. Recommendations for future research include deeper examinations into classical teachers’ instructional practices coupled with epistemological beliefs of learning as well as examinations of classical administrators’ beliefs and attitudes related to the importance of promoting creativity in classical schools.

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