Thesis (Ed.M.)--Boston University / PLEASE NOTE: Boston University Libraries did not receive an Authorization To Manage form for this thesis or dissertation. It is therefore not openly accessible, though it may be available by request. If you are the author or principal advisor of this work and would like to request open access for it, please contact us at open-help@bu.edu. Thank you. / 2031-01-01

<p> This study investigated the perceptions of teachers of grades three, four, and five regarding differentiated instruction in conjunction with Standards-Based Report Card as aligned to the Common Core State Standards. The purpose of this study was specifically seeking teacher perceptions on how these phenomenon interact, as well as teacher to parent communication, student awareness of standards, and reassessment practices. </p><p> The sample (n = 140) consisted of regular education teachers, grades three, four, and five from districts in both Illinois and Missouri. These districts used a Standards-Based Report Card at one or more of these intermediate grade levels. The participants completed a survey designed to determine teacher perceptions of the effect of differentiated instruction on the Standards-Based Report Card in conjunction with the Common Core State Standards. This survey was developed to answer the six research questions. </p><p> The researcher analyzed the data descriptively and inferentially. The researcher concluded that districts need more training and need to promote teacher buy-in. The descriptive results demonstrated teacher perceptions about communication, student awareness, and reassessment. Overall, teachers do not perceive that they are communicating more due to the Standards-Based Report Card. Teachers tend to agree that students are aware of their progress as a result of the Standards-Based Report Card and that they are reassessing in math and ELA. The researcher concluded the study by suggesting recommendations for further research in the area of Standards-Based Report Cards at the intermediate level.</p><p>

Typescript (photocopy). / Digitized by Kansas Correctional Industries / Department: English.

<p> This narrative inquiry explored the ways in which four mid-career English teachers construct themselves as W/writers and how those writerly identities are performed in their pedagogy. I curated data collected from extended interviews, journals, personal and professional writings to build narratives of these teachers-as-writers. Through these narratives and metaphorical thinking (Lakoff &amp; Johnson, 1980), I analyzed the wholeness of each participant&rsquo;s experience with writing.</p><p> Then, in stage two of the study, I used data collected from teaching observations to build a continuum of process &mdash;> product, employing Goffman&rsquo;s (1974) frame analysis to place the teachers within that continuum. This continuum represented the stable thread that continued through the teachers&rsquo; personal and professional identities and led to three insights: (1) Those teachers who identified as Writers were more comfortable teaching writing processes (2) The desire to be seen as a &ldquo;kind of W/writer or teacher&rdquo; brings risk writing instruction and (3) Agency provides Writers a way to mitigate the risk of teaching writing.</p><p>

<p> The purpose of this qualitative research project is to describe the scaffolding strategies used by a teacher to engage and support students as they work within the continua of biliterate development in the fifth-grade Spanish language immersion classroom. As language immersion programs and dual language schools continue to grow in popularity in Canada and the United States, this study seeks to illuminate and interpret a teacher&rsquo;s work with students in the Spanish Language Immersion Program (SLIP), a research site located in the urban Midwestern United States.</p><p> This instrumental case study employed the lens of Sociocultural Theory to explore the principal research question: How does the teacher scaffold student development of biliteracy within language and content instruction in the immersion school context? The research also explores pre-planned scaffolding versus interactional scaffolding, as well as the tensions and forces within the broader context that the teacher encounters while working with students in this bilingual educational environment. Classroom observations, teacher interviews, administration interviews, and artifacts were analyzed using methods borrowed from Grounded Theory.</p><p> Findings from this study highlight the characteristics of the Community of Practice created by the teacher in this classroom that include a focus upon encouragement, knowledge, organization, and literate habitus. Additionally, two visual models were created to present the data including: &ldquo;Scaffolding Episodes in the Development of Biliteracy,&rdquo; to illustrate the task-oriented support provided by the teacher, and &ldquo;Centripetal versus Centrifugal Forces,&rdquo; to present the forces and tensions that the teacher faced within the historical phases of the Spanish Language Immersion Program.</p><p>

<p> The workshop method of teaching in English Language Arts classrooms allowed teachers to be student-centered. Through the method, teachers taught for a specific amount of time and focused on one skill. Students always received independent reading time during the class period. In this mixed-methods study, the researcher investigated the use of the workshop method of teaching and growth in Lexile scores with middle school students. The study began January 2017 and took place in a suburban school district encompassing three middle schools. Thirteen middle school English Language Arts teachers chose to participate and 1,180 student scores were analyzed. The researcher utilized a teacher questionnaire to examine teacher confidence and knowledge of workshop teaching and SRI assessments, to gain the users&rsquo; perspective of the two variables examined in this study. Implementation was checked through the use of a classroom observation checklist, completed on each teacher twice, to ensure proper workshop teaching methods were taking place. Also, teachers answered a survey question determining how often they taught using the workshop method of teaching. Through qualitative data, the researcher found teachers positively regarded the workshop method of teaching; however, most teachers were not using all of the components of the workshop method of teaching in the classroom when observed. The quantitative data showed SRI student growth in every classroom. There was no significant difference between teachers who reported using the workshop method five days a week and those who reported using the method less than five days a week. The researcher recommends adding professional development for each teacher through book studies which will allow a focus on the individual needs of each educator. After the professional development occurs, a new study should take place for a longer duration of time and include more observations with teacher reflections.</p><p>

<p> This dissertation focuses on the literacy practices of three focal students who composed multimodal comic memoirs about the emotional struggles and obstacles they faced related to being labeled academically gifted and talented. As a qualitative action research study (Hewitt &amp; Little, 2005; Munn-Giddings, 2012), in which the teacher of the focal classroom was the primary researcher, a sociocultural framework (Dunsmore &amp; Fischer, 2010; Wertsch, 1991) was employed to investigate the three focal students&rsquo; uses of multimodal composition to address the research questions: RQ1, In what ways do gifted secondary students use the comics medium to produce multimodal memoirs? RQ2, What experiences do gifted secondary students represent when they design comic memoirs? and RQ3, What do gifted secondary students reveal about competing representations of race, gender, class, and giftedness as they depict themselves in comic memoirs? To address the research questions, the researcher used a qualitative case study design (Merriam, 1998; Yin, 2009), collecting data over five years (2013&ndash;2017) while teaching a literature-based comics class at a summer enrichment program for gifted secondary students. Based on a conceptual framework comprising the intersections of literacy practices related to multiliteracies (Sanders and Albers, 2010) and multimodalities (New London Group, 1996) in connection with visual literacy skills (Frey &amp; Fisher, 2008), data analysis included a variant of grounded theory (Glaser &amp; Strauss, 1967), Situational Analysis (Clarke, 2005), which takes a cartographic approach to the collection and analysis of data within the study&rsquo;s situation, including its environment, social spheres, and setting. Findings point to the focal students&rsquo; deep-seated emotional turmoil related to gender, racial, and gifted identities; reports of emotionally debilitating social and academic expectations connected to giftedness; and personal narratives of being silenced and socially alienated. Implications are discussed concerning how the unique visual literacy strategies available while making comic memoirs helped the focal students gain perspective on and insight into their struggles with identity and related social and cultural practices.</p><p>

Thesis (Ed.M.)--Boston University / PLEASE NOTE: Boston University Libraries did not receive an Authorization To Manage form for this thesis or dissertation. It is therefore not openly accessible, though it may be available by request. If you are the author or principal advisor of this work and would like to request open access for it, please contact us at open-help@bu.edu. Thank you. / 2031-01-01

Student stories are a potentially rich natural resource running through the veins of our schools, but this resource sometimes goes untapped. One strategy teachers can use to take advantage of this resource is to formally introduce oral storytelling into the classroom--to explicitly teach students how to choose and craft stories from their lives and then allow them to publicly perform those stories. The Story Shop Community Education Program (a pseudonym) in New York City is a non-profit devoted to bringing the art and craft of oral storytelling to populations that might not otherwise have access to it through series of free workshops. This research project took place over sixteen weeks of one such workshop at a Title I public high school in East New York, Brooklyn. It addresses the following question: How does an oral storytelling unit affect both individual students and their classroom relationships? More specifically, (1) How do individual students engage with an oral storytelling unit? (2) What is the perceived impact of an oral storytelling unit on classroom relationships? (3) How do students perceive the impact of an oral storytelling unit both on their understanding of themselves as individuals and on their relationships with each other? and (4) How does the teacher perceive the impact of an oral storytelling unit on her individual students and her classroom relationships? Drawing on an interpretivist/social network approach and grounded in the tenets of narrative qualitative research, this project utilizes mixed methods to investigate whether an oral storytelling unit provided students with opportunities for growth in identity development and deepening of their classroom relationships. This investigation documents how granting students the time and space to bear witness to each other's lives and `go public' with stories that could otherwise go unheard might improve classroom community and therefore student motivation.

The purpose of this post-qualitative study was to examine the rhizomatic functioning of youth’s engagements with literacy in a 7th grade English Language Arts classroom. I argued normed expectations of students’ engagement with literacy in schools imposes hegemonic control over students’ literacy learning, thus devaluing students’ in-the-moment, affective engagement. Rhizomatic theory was used to explore the ways students aligned to or veered from expected literacy norms as conceptualized through schooled literacy. The study took place during one academic semester between January-June in a New York City public middle school in Harlem. Data was produced through observations, exchanges (informal and formal interviews; verbal and written conversations), artifacts, and a researcher journal. A rhizomatic analysis was conducted to first identify the ideal expectation for literacy learning in the classroom as established through national, state, and local entities and then to follow deviations, or lines of flight, from these expected norms. Particular attention was paid to networked assemblages of participants (human and non-human) and the affective intensities, or desires that produce changes to an event or interaction, produced through these networks. The analysis was extended to consider these assemblages and affective intensities in light of the normed expectations for literacy learning, thus moving the rhizomatic analysis to what might become possible by examining difference. Findings are presented through the lines of flight and affective intensities that were produced through students’ engagements with literacy learning. These included forms of play, spontaneous peer-to-peer assistance, visceral response, and enacted agency. I discuss these intensities as unsanctioned engagement and explore how sanctioning such engagement provides more equitable opportunities for students to actively interact and achieve success as literacy learners. I argue such engagement is inherent to who youth are and who they are becoming. Because of this, how educators and researchers understand literacy learning and one’s engagement with literacy is extremely important for youth’s experiences and success in schooling. I conclude with implications for practice and research that work to actively transform conceptions of literacy instruction, theory, and research.