<p> Much has been written in the past twenty years about the importance of leadership at the school site level. There has been a major emphasis in the literature, in fact, on the power of the principal and the critical nature of the role for student achievement. Capable leaders have the ability to turn a struggling school into a thriving school. However, in urban school districts, high school principals tend not to stay on the job very long. There is considerable research in the area of principal retention as scholars attempt to uncover what factors influence retention. Large numbers of principals cite &ldquo;stress&rdquo; as their reason for leaving. However, there is not as much research into the ways in which stress affects high school principals in the urban context. Additionally, some urban high school principals seem to flourish in the position and are able to create significant and sustainable improvements at their urban schools.</p><p> After a review of the current literature on the urban context, retention, emotion, self-regulation, stress, and the role of the superintendent, this study will examined eight urban high school principals attempting to understand why they leave their positions or seem to thrive in them. The findings surfaced point to ways district personnel can better support their leaders and to inform administrator preparation programs about how to best prepare their candidates for transformative leadership positions.</p>

<p> As rates of teacher attrition continue to increase across the United States, school districts are trying to determine effective methods of retaining quality teachers for their classrooms (Ingersoll, 2012). Comprehensive teacher induction programs have shown to decrease rates of teacher attrition when implemented over a multiple-year span (Goldrick, 2016). This has created the need for school districts to determine if the costs associated with the implementation of comprehensive teacher induction programs are worthwhile investments. This study involved an examination of the perceptions of Missouri superintendents and/or human resources designees and secondary school principals regarding the benefits of comprehensive teacher induction programs and the role played by secondary school principals in those programs. Interview responses were collected and analyzed using coding methods to identify common phrases, key words, and themes. The findings of this study revealed the administrators believe teacher induction programs are beneficial in terms of reducing teacher attrition and establishing a collaborative culture for school districts. Furthermore, the administrators agreed secondary school principals have assumed a greater role in teacher induction than in years past. Although research exists defining comprehensive teacher induction and the most effective components of such programs, there still exists a discrepancy among school districts as to how new teachers are supported. School superintendents, school boards, and state policymakers should be prepared to evaluate the teacher induction programs across the state to determine the breadth of this disparity and to make attempts to narrow these discrepancies as a way to provide high quality instruction in all school districts.</p>

<p> In the last 20 years online virtual high school has become a viable alternative to traditional high school. The dropout rate for online programs rivals that of brick and mortar high schools. Among the reasons students drop out of online virtual high school programs is the experience of isolation from teachers and peers. Moore (1972, 2013) described this sense of isolation as transactional distance and created a theory of how this phenomenon can be countered to promote academic success. Transactional Distance Theory stated that the sense of isolation could be reduced by carefully balancing interaction between student and teacher, student and student, student and course content, course structure and student autonomy. The research question was whether or not a group of experts would reach consensus on which instructional design strategies could reduce transactional distance and increase student engagement for virtual high school students. An exhaustive literature review found that very little is written about this topic. However, the literature does provide information about transactional distance theory, instructional design strategies, the characteristics of high school students, and the role administrators and policy makers can play in supporting these instructional design strategies. A three round Delphi study was conducted with a nationwide panel of instructional design experts with online virtual high school experience via an Internet based research software. The results of the research study indicated that there are a number of instructional design strategies that could be used to for this purpose. This research study led to the creation guidelines that could be used with a variety of instructional design models. Ultimately these guidelines could become an instructional design model.</p>

<p> While dual enrollment participation has substantially increased among Caucasian, Hispanic, and Asian high school students, the rates of participation among African American students, especially male students, has decreased since 2006. As a result of low participation rate in dual enrollment and research studies, little is known about the dual enrollment experience among high-achieving African American males. The purpose of this qualitative study, using a transcendental phenomenology design, was to explore the dual enrollment experiences of 10 high-achieving African American males, between 18 to 22 years, who currently attend a community college that is part of the Texas State Community College Consortium (a pseudonym). Descriptive interviews with study participants and qualitative data analyses were conducted in accordance with transcendental phenomenology methodological Four themes emerged from the data. The first theme was academic rigor of college, noted by all 10 participants. The second theme, also noted by all 10 participants, was social support and encouragement, which had six sub-themes pertaining to support from family, fellow students, and high school and college faculty/administration. Data from the 10 participants revealed the third theme of college and academic readiness, which was delineated into three sub-themes related to college and academic readiness, responsibility, and planning skills. The fourth and last theme was college tuition/financial benefits of dual enrollment, remarked upon by three students. Results from this study, can be utilized to promote social change as it concerns African American male&rsquo;s academic achievement and college persistence.</p>

<p> This grounded theory study explored the experiences of lay faculty, administration and Sisters of St. Joseph of Carondelet (CSJ) to capture how the spirit of the CSJ continues in the organizational culture of their sponsored secondary schools. Since 1950, CSJ in the Los Angeles Province, have experienced a very similar decline as other orders of religious across the United States. In order to preserve the culture and history of the CSJ in their sponsored secondary schools, the researcher conducted twenty semi-structured interviews to capture the lived experiences of those currently serving, and those who have served, on the four secondary school campuses.</p><p> Utilizing the literature on preserving organizational culture from Edgar Schien, and Lee Bolman and Terrance Deal, the research seemed to conclude that this charism has been preserved even through transitions to lay leadership. A series of seven distinct themes emerged indicating that a CSJ school: consistently incorporates the gospel values into all aspects of the school community; seeks out opportunities to model service to the dear neighbor in how faculty, staff and students serve one another, and in turn impact the broader community; serves a diverse population of students and intentionally creates a culture of unity and support, and a sense of belonging, to cultivate a community of acceptance, love and sisterhood; fosters an environment of excellence through the intentional actions of teachers and leaders to be capacity builders, assisting all young women to become all of &ldquo;which woman is capable&rdquo;; recognizes the essential role that leadership plays in fostering a gospel-driven, nurturing environment, evidenced in the faculty, staff and sisters as models; is marked by a spirit of joy and fun that is tangibly felt among the students, the faculty and staff, and throughout the entire school community, and recognizes the challenges with living out the gospel values and being called to building a spirit of unity and love.</p><p> The results of the study suggest that the organizational school culture has been able to preserve the charism of the Sisters of St. Joseph of Carondelet, echoing their foundational spirituality dating back to 1650 Le Puy, France. </p>

<p> Young Americans must be equipped, both individually and collectively, with the 21^st century skills, critical thinking, communication, collaboration, and creativity, in order to thrive in the global landscape which lies before them. Little political or economic capital is devoted to maximizing academic opportunities for gifted secondary learners. Limiting opportunities for children and youth with the potential for performing at remarkably high levels of accomplishment, deprives them of their right to an appropriate education and wastes a national resource. Recognizing that limited capital often circumscribes schools in their ability to provide special programs, the researcher proffers debate, a course within the standard curriculum, as an avenue to providing gifted secondary learners with depth, breadth and complexity while accelerating the development of critical thinking, communication and collaboration.</p><p> The threefold purpose of the study was to a) establish debate as a viable platform for providing the depth, breadth, and complexity needed by gifted secondary learners while developing critical thinking; b) examine the self-reported attitudes, principles and practices of AP-trained teachers, those most likely to have gifted students, related to 21^st century skills, particularly critical thinking, the needs of gifted learners, and debate&rsquo;s ability to meet those needs, and; c) examine the effects of 6 independent variables, area of AP training, school size, community size and the presence or absence of three salient factors, teacher training in gifted education, debate in the school and special programs in the school for gifted learners upon teacher attitudes.</p><p> Results. A long history of empirical study confirms debate&rsquo;s efficacy at developing the 21^st century skills, communication, collaboration, and critical thinking. Survey results for a sample of 202 AP teachers indicated greatest importance is allocated to challenge and critical thinking and least importance to standardized testing. Area of AP training had no significant effect on AP teachers&rsquo; strong agreement that disruptions and too much test emphasis act as impediments to the development of critical thinking. There are significant differences between AP training groups in critical thinking development and assessment methods, communication, collaboration, and belief in the efficacy of debate. School and community size did not act as factors. Teacher self-reporting on the presence or absence of debate in their schools, the presence or absence of special programs for gifted learners in their schools, and their own special training in gifted education was substantially different from data available from the State Department of Education and from the chairman of the state chapter of the National Speech and Debate Association, therefore, no conclusions regarding the effects of those three independent variables could be drawn.</p>

<p> The purpose of this dissertation was to examine the relationship between student access to a computer at home and academic achievement. The 2009 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) dataset was probed using the National Data Explorer (NDE) to investigate correlations in the subsets of SES, Parental Education, Race, and Gender as it relates to access of a home computer and improved performance scores for U.S. public school grade 12 science students. A causal-comparative approach was employed seeking clarity on the relationship between home access and performance scores. The influence of home access cannot overcome the challenges students of lower SES face. The achievement gap, or a second digital divide, for underprivileged classes of students, including minorities does not appear to contract via student access to a home computer. Nonetheless, in tests for significance, statistically significant improvement in science performance scores was reported for those having access to a computer at home compared to those not having access. Additionally, regression models reported evidence of correlations between and among subsets of controls for the demographic factors gender, race, and socioeconomic status. Variability in these correlations was high; suggesting influence from unobserved factors may have more impact upon the dependent variable. Having access to a computer at home increases performance scores for grade 12 general science students of all races, genders and socioeconomic levels. However, the performance gap is roughly equivalent to the existing performance gap of the national average for science scores, suggesting little influence from access to a computer on academic achievement. The variability of scores reported in the regression analysis models reflects a moderate to low effect, suggesting an absence of causation. These statistical results are accurate and confirm the literature review, whereby having access to a computer at home and the predictor variables were found to have a significant impact on performance scores, although the data presented suggest computer access at home is less influential upon performance scores than poverty and its correlates.</p>

<p> This multiple case study utilized a qualitative approach to research student engagement at the middle school level. Specifically, this project contributes to the understanding of how students at a STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) magnet middle school and a traditional public middle school perceive student engagement in the classroom as classified into the categories of behavioral, emotional, cognitive, and agentic engagement (Lee &amp; Reeve, 2012; Reeve &amp; Tseng, 2011). Middle school students in this project participated in a classroom engagement unit of inquiry, produced photo-elicitation data depicting positive examples of classroom engagement, produced descriptions of those photos, and discussed engagement in photo-elicited focus group interviews that revealed their thoughts and beliefs about engagement in the classroom setting. Results revealed that middle school students at traditional and STEM sites have similar perceptions related to each of the categories of student engagement. However, two distinguishing characteristics were discovered from this research. First, students at the traditional middle school attributed student engagement as primarily an individual experience whereas students at the STEM middle school perceived student engagement as mainly collaborative for each category of engagement. Second, students at the traditional middle school identified a teacher-centered aspect to student engagement that was absent from the perceptions of students at the STEM school. Additional research on student engagement is warranted due to the changing landscape of middle school education.</p><p>

Experimenters evaluated the effects of a homework session on undergraduate students' homework performance through an adapted alternating treatments design in two introduction to behavior analysis courses. Several participants attended homework sessions; however, homework submission and homework mastery did not vary as a function of homework session attendance or availability. Homework submission remained high throughout the experiment regardless of attendance at or availability of a homework session. Many participants responded that they were not interested in or did not need homework sessions. Participants who attended homework sessions rated them as neutral or helpful overall, with longer time and different time as the most common suggestions for improvement.

Modern Physical Education (PE) administered systemic models of teaching crafts. It atrophied the play element in human nature, and shaped a single-lens attitude to the treatment of bodies. Framing minds, it veiled the conditions of learning processes and thus “instituted” the sovereignty of subjective concerns. It created many unexplained “gaps” between abstract concerns and pragmatic issues. Following language’s poststructural analysis, PE’s professional communication practices were exposed to alternative methodological refocusing from conforming to move to personalise the agent’s experience in moving to learn. In the wake of poststructuralism came Whitehead’s Physical Literacy (PL) which I adopt as “leitmotif” to reform PE’s teacher preparation and schooling practices. PL addresses children up to 14 years. For older pupils, PL’s language needs to constitute versions of human purposes voiced by the introduction of a new development called “Movement Literacy” (ML). ML acknowledges that language and movement are very different forms of “self-expression”. By itself however, self-expression is inadequate when it comes to learning how to learn. Critical dialogue needs to be brought in to facilitate meaningful innovation in the PE world. By employing the philosophies of phenomenology and hermeneutics I make a case that expression in languaging movement [subjecting the agent’s account to hermeneutic treatment] is expression for others, and in exchange with others the expression is redefined, and changes the way one sees and talks about movement and about oneself. In its reflective practice, reverentially, ML will also unpack pedagogy’s hidden protocol, hoping to reclaim PE’s authentic purpose. It connects secular matters with sacred implications by reconciling the polemic differences between “techne” [purpose] and “phronesis ” [prudence]. With limited reference to Eastern “selflessness” ML advances teaching, through pedagogy and andragogy as a life-time mission. Not providing answers, the thesis offers a manifesto attempting to facilitate new questions such as: how can language and movement communicate? and how can movement educators “minister” to their learner’s sense of well-being?