The U.S. government has stated in federal guidelines that parents must be involved in their children's education in order for student achievement to increase. For more than 5 years, a small rural middle school in Mississippi was designated a low-performing school due to its failure to achieve the required standards for quality distribution index and adequate yearly progress on the Mississippi Curriculum Test, 2nd Edition. The purpose of this study was to examine whether parents' and teachers' perspectives regarding parental involvement and student achievement differed at the school. Epstein's theoretical framework was used as the basis for this quantitative study. Quantitative data from 250 parents and 28 teachers were gathered on the effectiveness of home-school collaboration for 4th through 8th-grade students. A t test was used to determine if there were significant differences in parents' and teachers' perspectives regarding parental involvement and student achievement. There was a statistically significant difference (p < .001) between parents' and teachers' perspectives, whereas the teachers' attitudes were higher regarding their general attitude of parental involvement, parental involvement practices, and parental responsibilities. Based on study findings, a 3-day professional development/training curriculum and materials project was developed to assist teachers at the school with developing strategies for increasing parental involvement and student achievement. This study could possibly contribute to positive social change by increasing teachers' understanding of parents' needs and enhancing their ability to effectively communicate with them, which may lead to more involvement by parents in their children's education and higher achievement by students.

Recent research shows that teachers’ level of Mathematical Knowledge for Teaching (MKT) and their beliefs about teaching and learning effect teaching practices and student achievement. Higher levels of MKT typically lead to more effective teaching abilities in terms of helping students make meaning of mathematical concepts, but beliefs seem to be a mediating factor in this relationship. One specific teaching practice that can help guide students through this meaning making is questioning. Although it is known that MKT and beliefs play an important role in outcomes of teacher practices, the effects of these factors on teachers’ ability to ask meaningful questions have not yet been explored. This mixed methods study uses descriptive data of teachers’ questioning patterns with a cross-case analysis of five elementary mathematics teachers to investigate how the nature of elementary teachers’ questioning changes between procedural and conceptual mathematics lessons, and how teachers’ level of MKT and their beliefs about teaching and learning aid in or inhibit their ability to ask questions that engage students in mathematical reasoning and sense making. High levels of alignment with rule-based beliefs about teaching mathematics were found to be a major inhibitor to teachers’ ability to ask meaningful questions in the classroom. While high MKT is helpful in creating reasoning-based dialogue in the classroom, high rule-based beliefs limit the potential effects of high MKT on teacher questioning practices. Relationships between MKT, beliefs, and questioning are further dissected, and implications for teacher development efforts are discussed.

Research suggests that teaching in international settings fosters professional growth and promotes tolerance for working in multicultural and linguistically diverse classrooms for U.S. teachers upon returning to the U.S. to work in schools. These studies portray teaching abroad as an unproblematic and neutral project, and narrowly focus on the benefit to the individual teacher during their temporary stay in a foreign country and when returning home to the U.S. Absent from these studies are two groups: 1) teachers from the U.S. who work in non-governmental organizations and private school settings abroad, but have no pedagogical training, and 2) host country citizens (unless they serve a purpose for the U.S. teacher, such as providing growth, teaching cultural nuances, etc.) These studies also lack an analysis of how international teaching, especially in bilingual and English-language contexts, affect the local community outside the bounds of the study’s setting. Scholars of transnational feminist theory suggest consideration of how these relationships shape not just the people who travel across nation-state borders, but also those who are affected in the local context. Scholars of critical pedagogy remind teachers that education is not only pedagogical, but also political and ideological. Grounded in these two theoretical frameworks, as well as Critical Discourse Analysis, this study examines English-language education and teaching in the Central American country of Honduras. The findings suggest that host country citizens express reservations about these partnerships. Although U.S. and international teachers second-guess the utility of English-language education in Honduras, they justify their presence teaching there because of their ability to speak English, and they define what success means in the future of their students.

In this study I present case studies of the art classes at three private schools in the Midwest. The schools include a Catholic school, a Mennonite school and a Transcendental Meditation school. In the study I spent time observing art classes at each school for eighteen weeks totaling an average of thirty hours in each school. At the schools I observed the art classes and interviewed the art teachers, administrators and students in order to be able to describe the history and philosophy of each school as well as the art teaching and learning that occur in the art classes. The purpose of the study is not to determine which school is best or if they are better than public schools, but to present descriptions of art classes in nontraditional settings. Accomplishing this inquiry presented the possibility of drawing out unique or innovative teaching practices that could be implemented in any art classroom to improve the quality of education.

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Curriculum-Based Measures in writing (CBM-W) assesses a variety of fluency-based components of writing. While support exists for the use of CBM measures in the area of writing, there is a need to conduct further validation studies to investigate the utility of these measures within elementary and secondary classrooms. Since only countable indices are used in CBM-W, this study explored the possibility of using an assessment that measured writing quality in conjunction with the CBM metric. To accomplish this, three pieces of data were used in this study. The CBM metrics of total words written, words spelled correctly, correct word sequences, percentage of words spelled correctly, and percentage of correct word sequences were scored from a timed writing passage that second grade students completed. Scores from the district writing assessment that classroom teachers rated using an analytic rubric that focused on quality were also analyzed. Last, a validated writing assessment, the TOWL-3, was used as the criterion measure. Using correlation and regression methods, results indicated that correct word sequences was the best predictor performance on the TOWL-3. Even though the teacher writing assessment correlated with the TOWL-3 at the significant level, adding it to the scores from the CBM-W measures did not significantly increase the validity.

The nature of geometric tasks that students engage with in classrooms influences the development of their geometric thinking. Although mathematics standards emphasize formal proofs and mathematical reasoning skills, geometric tasks in classrooms remain focused on students’ abilities to recall mathematical facts and use simple procedures rather than conceptual understanding. In order to facilitate students’ high-level mathematical thinking, teachers need to provide sufficient opportunities for students to engage in cognitively demanding mathematical tasks. The use of dynamic geometry software (DGS) in classrooms facilitates conceptual understanding of geometric proofs. The black box approach is a new type of task in which students interact with pre-constructed figures to explore mathematical relationships by dragging and measuring geometric objects. This approach is challenging to students because it “requires a link between the spatial or visual approach and the theoretical one” (Hollebrands, Laborde, & Sträßer, 2008, p. 172). This study examined how preservice secondary mathematics teachers make choices or create geometric tasks using DGS in terms of cognitive demand levels and how the black box approach influences the way preservice teachers conceptualize their roles in their lesson designs. Three preservice secondary mathematics teachers who took a semester-long mathematics teaching course participated in this qualitative case study. Data include two lesson plans, before and after instructions for geometric DGS tasks, pre- and post-interview transcripts, electronic files of geometric tasks, and reflection papers from each participant. The Mathematical Task Framework (Stein, Smith, Henningsen, & Silver, 2009) was used to characterize mathematical tasks with respect to level of cognitive demand. A Variety of geometric task types using DGS was introduced to the participants (Galindo, 1998). The dragging modalities framework (Arzarello, Olivero, Paola, & Robutti, 2002; Baccaglini-Frank & Mariotti, 2010) was employed to emphasize the cognitive demand of geometric tasks using DGS. The PURIA model situated the participants’ conceptualized roles in technology use (Beaudin & Bowers, 1997; Zbiek & Hollebrands, 2008). Findings showed that the preservice teachers only employed geometric construction types on low level geometric DGS tasks, which relied on technological step-by-step procedures students would follow in order to arrive at the same results. The preservice teachers transformed those low level tasks into high level tasks by preparing DGS tasks in advance in accordance with the black box approach and by encouraging students to explore the tasks by posing appropriate questions. However, as soon as they prepared high level DGS tasks with deductive proofs, low level procedure-based tasks followed in their lesson planning. The participants showed positive attitudes towards using DGS to prepare high level geometric tasks that differ from textbook-like procedural tasks. Major factors influencing preservice teachers’ preparation of high level tasks included teachers’ knowledge of mathematics, pedagogy, and technology, as well as ways of using curriculum resources and teachers’ abilities to set appropriate lesson goals. Findings of this investigation can provide guidelines for integrating DGS in designing high level geometric tasks for teacher educators, researchers, and textbook publishers.

Research studies have investigated issues in the teaching of writing, particularly at the elementary and university levels. Studies of out-of-school writing done by adolescents have focused on digital contexts and social media. This study examines the intersections of the out-of-school and in-school writing worlds of three high school writers: a poet, a novelist, and a contest essay writer. I use data gathered over seven years from the student writers and four of their English language arts teachers. Research questions focused on how notions of student writers and the teaching of high school English might be informed by the ways student writers described their out-of-class writing and motivation for writing, how their teachers developed and implemented their philosophies and practices in teaching writing, and how the student writers developed their internally persuasive discourses about writing. In analyzing case study data to answer these questions, I used constant comparison analysis and narrative inquiry analysis, drawing upon theories of heteroglossic discourses, figured worlds, and writing identity. My findings show that in the intersections of out-of-school and in-school writing experiences, students select some writing practices and discourses from their teachers to adopt or adapt, such as developing writing processes, participating in writing communities, and caring about writing. They complicate their definitions of writing, however, as they create figured worlds of writing in which they explore identity, navigate and negotiate complex emotions, and receive recognition. The students illustrate their dialogism with writing discourses in stories of improvisation in which they find power and enact resistance. I argue that writing teachers need encouragement, education, and agency to entertain more complex perceptions of student writers and teaching writing to support students for future personal, academic, career, and public discourse worlds.

How do elementary educators approach cultural diversity within international school settings? How do North American teachers negotiate the tensions and experiences they have as cultural agents living abroad while valuing the cultural identities of the students they serve? This study describes how international teachers' unique positions, experiences and perspectives affect their attention to cultural diversity within their classrooms. Sociocultural theory frames this study with emphasis on personal and professional identities, narrative inquiry and culturally responsive teaching. I interweave narrative inquiry and ethnographic research methods as theoretical and methodological frameworks. I interviewed and observed the 3 North American educators in their elementary classrooms in an American school in China over several weeks. Data collected in this study included interview transcripts, artifacts from the school and classrooms, photographs and field notes. I also weave my own stories from my experiences as an international teacher throughout the study. The Atlas TI qualitative computer program assisted the constant-comparative analysis process. Grounded and axial coding revealed a pattern across participants' stories and approaches to cultural diversity. All three teachers authored stories from their cross cultural experiences that informed their identities as educators. The teachers questioned their cultural agent role, reflected on their responses and took action in their teaching to be culturally responsive. The approaches each teacher implemented to be responsive to the cultural worlds in their classroom related to their cultural agent identities in their personal stories of cross-cultural experiences. Findings indicated that teachers were more likely to be culturally responsive in their teaching when they implemented a constructivist educational philosophy in their classrooms. This study reconceptualized cultural responsiveness to include the diverse cultural worlds of the student, teacher and international school setting.

Using a mixed methods design this study investigates in-service K-12 foreign language teachers’ beliefs about technology and factors that influence its implementation in instruction. The study employs an Explanatory Design using a two-phase approach, where qualitative data is collected and analyzed to elaborate on the quantitative data results. A total of ninety-nine in-service K-12 foreign language teachers from across the state of Iowa responded to the Modified Technology Implementation Questionnaire about their technological beliefs and barriers to technology integration within classroom practices. The results of the instrument were tabulated using a hierarchical multiple regression to uncover factors impacting technology integration. To further enhance the quantitative findings, ten teachers were purposefully sampled from the same participant pool for follow-up interviews. Follow-up interviews with participants were conducted using thematic analysis. The findings from this study suggest that both internal and external variables impact teachers’ uses of technology. Some of the more contextual factors were time, resources, support, professional development, class sizes, and scheduling conflicts. In addition to contextual factors, teachers’ more internal factors about technology further impacted its incorporation. The study uncovered three main internal elements: beliefs, perceived benefits, and teaching style as factors making a difference in the utilization of technology. The internal factors were more influential than external factors in their ability to be successful with technology integration. The conclusion includes recommendations and implications for administrators, professional development coordinators, teachers, and teacher preparation institutions.