The purpose of the study was to compare the frequencies of a selected set of teaching behaviors of trained and untrained teachers in elementary schools in St. Lucia. The dependent variables in the study were the frequencies of Structuring, Questioning, Feedback and Praise behaviors. The independent variables were training, grades awarded at teaching practice, and subject areas. Records of the lessons were obtained through the use of audiotapes. The behaviors were coded using a low inference observation schedule. The data were analyzed using means and standard deviations. The significance and inferential statistic applied was the chi-square. Significant differences were found to exist in the frequencies of Questioning, Feedback and Praise behaviors of trained and untrained teachers. Significant variations were found in the Questioning and Feedback behaviors according to the grades awarded at teaching practice. There were significant variations in the frequencies of all classes of behaviors across subject areas.

Due to students not meeting minimum proficiency levels in reading, a central Florida middle school that was rated an A school for 4 years consecutively dropped to a B rating during the 2012-2013 school year and was 10 points away from dropping to a C rating in the 2013-2014 school year. The purpose of this phenomenological study was to describe classroom implementation of Internet technology in a middle school classroom in an attempt to address the steady decline in reading scores. Guided by Piaget, Dewey, and Vygotsky's social constructivist view of education, this study explored if and how teachers used Internet technology to complement their curricular content. Research questions addressed how teachers described their experiences with Internet technology versus traditional methods to teach those reading skills necessary for students to derive meaning from the material taught. A criterion sample of 30 middle school teachers who were certified in their content areas and who had incorporated literacy into instruction participated in semistructured interviews. Data were coded and organized by themes, which included comfort with the Internet, level of usage, and the need for professional development. Findings revealed that teachers often used Internet technology to address reading skills; however, they were not aware they needed to teach students how to evaluate sources of online information. Participants requested ongoing professional development in reading and on methods to critically evaluate information in a digital world. The findings from this study can be utilized by educators to provide professional development and to design lessons that will focus on these learning gaps, thereby deepening students' literacy and critical thinking skills and thus enacting positive social change for students.

To study present school system of Spencer County and to devise a plan of reorganization of present system in order to provide a well rounded educational opportunity for the boys and girls of Spencer County, Kentucky. The consideration of this problem are: Comparison of teacher qualifications in the types of schools. Computation of enrollment, average daily attendance of the various types of schools. Determination cost per pupil and total cost of operation of present school system and reorganized school system as salary of teacher, maintenance, transportation and needed buildings. Provision for free transportation of all high school pupils.

The United States has attempted to improve access to quality education for students. While the United States has seen access to higher quality of education as a solution to improving schools, this has not worked. The purpose of this paper is to analyze the methods created to improve access to quality education and their effectiveness. Methods that will be analyzed are acts passed by the United States and the charter school movement. In this paper I will look at the methods used in Germany and Colombia to help develop a new method of improving the quality of education in the United States through the use of nonprofit organizations. Nonprofit organizations have played a role in improving the education of Germany and Colombia. Nonprofit organizations could be a solution in improving the quality of education students receive through hands on experience, a standardized test, providing resources for students, and improving the quality of teaching in each school. The use of nonprofit organizations can help under-resourced districts improve, help create a test to accurately measure student success, and help districts understand how they can improve.

The goal of this study was to investigate the interaction between professional development and professional capital within international schools in Asia. The researcher employed a multi-site case study to inform the research goals. A conceptual framework based on Hargreaves and Fullan’s (2012) professional capital theory was used to guide the study’s methods and data collection. The data were collected in two phases. The first phase consisted of a digital survey that was distributed to ten international schools associated with the East Asia Regional Council of Schools (EARCOS) and the Office of Overseas Schools (OSS). The survey was analyzed to identify the experiences and perceptions of professional development within international schools. The second phase was comprised of semi-structured interview data from twelve international educators to explore the relationship between professional development and professional capital. The findings of this study helped outline themes of how a professional development fosters professional capital within the international schools. Specifically, international educators use professional development to increase human capital through their experiences to improve personal practice, while developing, retaining, and attracting educators to the international schools. Social capital is impacted through the amount of time international educators allocate to collaborative and networking experiences with other international educators within their field through professional development. By increasing decisional capital, international educators develop expertise with effective professional development guided through the support of mentors by increasing decisional capital. The findings suggest professional development within the international schools studied is connected to an increase in professional capital. The findings also suggest international educators need to maintain a level of autonomy in regard to decision making to continue to increase professional capital within international schools. Suggestions for a refinement of the theory of professional capital leadership include a balanced approach to professional development where teachers use their human capital and school leaders use their social capital collectively to make professional development decisions.

The teacher-student relationship is multidimensional and fluid. This is especially true for students who come from disadvantaged backgrounds. Educational leaders in the public school setting cannot control which students enroll at their school sites. The only thing teachers, as educational leaders in K-12 public education, have complete control over is the environment they create in their classrooms. Among those student groups most reflecting few gains on state and federal reports of proficiency data are students who typically come from backgrounds besieged with challenges or from historically underserved and marginalized communities. In this transcendental phenomenological study, the phenomenon investigated was how secondary teachers described their experiences in building relationships with students identified as at promise. A secondary public school setting was the focus of this study. The intent of this study was to understand the essence of the lived experiences of teachers as they described their experiences in building relationships with at-promise youth. Teachers must leverage themselves in the quest to form positive and strong relationships with their students. In shifting the adverse narrative about the political identity used to categorize these students, the antipathetic mindset related to these students in public schools too shall shift. Research has demonstrated that at-promise students respond best in school settings that provide a culture where teachers intentionally construct a caring interaction laden with respect and recognition. It is important to foster agency in at-promise students through the understanding of the social, political, and economic structures that served to impact their generational past, inform their present, and prepare their future. This research study focused on the complex dynamic of the teacher-student relationship. This research investigation connected the important role teachers play in the lives of their students, teacher mindset about at-promise student success, and how strong and positive teacher-student relationships have the potential to encourage agency in at-promise students through meaningful recognition of their promise for academic success over their presupposed risks. This study’s findings highlight the critical need for teachers to create intentional opportunities to foster strong teacher-student relationships with at-promise students.

This project’s goal is to promote and improve the mathematical literacy of fourth-grade Hispanic/Latino and English learners through the use of a graphic mathematical mediated structure. Current California Common Core data finds fourth-grade Hispanic/Latino and English learners significantly behind White and Asian students in mathematics, especially in understanding written word problems. Research supports the assumption that as a tool, a graphic mathematical mediated structure could: 1) foster conceptual understanding; 2) build content terminology; 3) allow students opportunities to justify their solutions; 4) integrate writing in math; and 5) provide a platform for discourse. This innovative pedagogical project specifically focused on how fourth-grade Hispanic/Latino and English learners could navigate through a graphic math organizer in order to understand how to add and subtract fractions in word problems. The work presents six teacher models of graphic mathematical mediated structures. Each model provides a fourth-grade word problem related to fractions. Respectively, teacher and student templates, lists of content vocabulary, and suggestions to teach each problem-solving exercise using the graphic mathematical mediated structures that were created and developed are included. Struggling Hispanic/Latino and English learners’ need a pedagogical structure and process to succeed in solving math word problems. Hence, the need for a graphic mathematical mediated structure to diminish the groups’ prevalent mathematical achievement gap and to increase their achievement in mathematics.

This study documented the changes in understanding a class of eighth grade high school-level biology students experienced through a biology unit introducing genetics. Learning profiles for 55 students were created using concept maps and interviews as qualitative and quantitative instruments. The study provides additional support to the theory of learning progressions called for by experts in the field. The students' learning profiles were assessed to determine the alignment with a researcher-developed learning profile. The researcher-developed learning profile incorporated the learning progressions published in the Next Generation Science Standards, as well as current research in learning progressions for 5-10th grade students studying genetics. Students were found to obtain understanding of the content in a manner that was nonlinear, even circuitous. This opposes the prevailing interpretation of learning progressions, that knowledge is ascertained in escalating levels of complexity. Learning progressions have implications in teaching sequence, assessment, education research, and policy. Tracking student understanding of other populations of students would augment the body of research and enhance generalizability.

While professional developers have been encouraging teachers to plan for discourse around problem solving tasks as a way to orchestrate mathematically productive discourse (Stein, Engle, Smith, & Hughes, 2008; Stein, Smith, Henningsen, & Silver, 2009) no research has been conducted explicitly examining the relationship between the plans that teachers make for orchestrating discourse around problem solving tasks and the outcomes of implementation of those plans. This research study is intended to open the door to research on planning for discourse around problem solving tasks. This research study analyzes how 12 middle school mathematics teachers participating in the Mathematics Problem Solving Model professional development research program implemented lesson plans that they wrote in preparation for whole-class discussions around cognitively demanding problem solving tasks. The lesson plans consisted of the selection and sequencing of student solutions to be presented to the class along with identification of the mathematical ideas to be highlighted in the student solutions and questions that would help to make the mathematics salient. The data used for this study were teachers' lesson plans and the audio-recordings of the whole-class discussions implemented by the teachers. My research question for this study was: How do teachers' written plans for orchestrating mathematical discourse around problem solving tasks influence the opportunities teachers create for students to reason mathematically? To address this research question, I analyzed the data in three different ways. First, I measured fidelity to the literal lesson by comparing what was planned in the ISAs to what was actually took place in the implemented debriefs. That is, I analyzed the extent to which the teachers were implementing the basic steps in their lesson (i.e. sharing the student work they identified, addressing the ideas to highlight and the planned questions). Second, I analyzed the teachers' fidelity to the intended lesson by comparing the number of high-press questions in the lesson plans (that is, questions that create opportunities for the students to reason mathematically) to the number of high-press questions in the implemented discussion. I compared these two sets of data using a linear regression analysis and t-tests. Finally, I conducted a qualitative analysis, using grounded theory, of a subset of four teachers from the study. I examined the improvisational moves of the teachers as they addressed the questions they had planned, building a theory of how the different ways that teachers implemented their planned questions affected the opportunities for their students to reason mathematically around those planned questions. My findings showed that it was typical for the teachers to implement most of the steps of their lesson plans faithfully, but that there was not a statistically significant correlation between the number of high-press questions they planned and the number of high-press questions they asked during the whole-class discussions, indicating that there were other factors that were influencing the frequency with which the teachers were asked these questions that prompted their students to reason mathematically. I hypothesize that these factors include, but are not limited to, the norms in the classrooms, teachers' knowledge about teaching mathematics, and teachers' beliefs about mathematics. Nevertheless, my findings did show that in the portions of the whole-class discussions where the teachers had planned at least one high-press question, they, on average, asked more high-press questions than when they did not plan to ask any. Finally, I identified four different ways that teachers address their planned questions which impacted the opportunities for students to reason mathematically. Teachers addressed their questions as drop-in (they asked the question and then moved on as soon as a response was elicited), embedded (the ideas in the question were addressed by a student without being prompted), telling (the teacher told the students the `response' to the question without providing an opportunity for the students to attempt to answer the question themselves) and sustained focus (the teacher sustained the focus on the question by asking the students follow-up questions).

The dropout rate for first-generation Mexican Americans students in American schools has increased in the past decade. The purpose of this study, as reflected in the central research question, was to explore the factors that influenced the decision of first-generation Mexican American students to transition to high school or drop out after Grade 8. The research design was a phenomenological case study. The conceptual framework was based on current research surrounding first-generation Mexican American student dropout questions. In addition, how the concepts of family and community involvement and relationships between the home and school have an impact on the first generation Mexican American dropout rate. Participants were 10 first-generation Mexican Americans between the ages of 18-24, who either dropped out of school at the end of Grade 8 or completed high school. Data was collected from multiple interviews with participants. Data analysis involved coding, categorization, and analysis of themes and discrepant data. Factors that influenced students' decisions to stay in school or drop out included lack of support at home, lack of support at school, and financial needs. This study contributes to positive social change because educators may develop a deeper understanding about how to prevent first-generation Mexican American students from dropping out of school. In helping these students to graduate from high school, educators will assist these students in developing educational and employment goals that will confidently lead them to lives that are more productive.