The problem with which this investigation was concerned was the relationship between selected facilitative characteristics of human interaction and other factors associated with the secondary teacher. These factors included job satisfaction and courses completed beyond the bachelor's degree.

The problem of this study was to develop an instrument which would reveal whether certain fundamental philosophical and educational beliefs are held by public school teachers in the areas of elementary education, secondary education, and guidance.

The case study examined how three preservice teachers within a Master of Arts in Teaching program at a small, private university negotiated meaning around an educational practice--collaborative action research. Preservice teachers must negotiate multiple, and often competing, internal and external discourses as they sort out what educational practices, policies, organizational structures to accept or reject as presented in the teacher education program. This negotiation is a dynamic, contextual, unique meaning-making process that extends, redirects, dismisses, reinterprets, modifies, or confirms prior beliefs (Wenger, 1998). Korthagen's (2004) model for facilitating understanding and reflection was used to explore the process of negotiating meaning. Known as the Onion Model, it includes six levels: the environment, behavior, competencies, beliefs, identity, and mission. When alignment occurs between all levels, Korthagen explained that individuals experience wholeness, energy, and presence. In contrast, tensions can occur within a level or between levels of the Onion Model and limit the effectiveness of the preservice teacher regarding the area in question. Reflecting on the collaborative action research experience through the layers of the Korthagen's model may allow preservice teachers (and professors) to identify degrees of alignment and areas of tension as preservice teachers negotiate meaning. Once identified, areas of tension can be deconstructed and better understood; self-understanding can empower individuals to assume an active and powerful role in their professional developmental. To explore how preservice teachers negotiated their identity regarding collaborative action research, the following research questions guided the study: (1) How do preservice teachers' trajectories align with the practice of collaborative action research? (2) How do individuals negotiate meaning regarding the practice of collaborative action research? (3) How do preservice teachers frame collaborative action research in relation to their future practice? Triangulated data from interviews, observations, and document analysis was collected, analyzed, and interpreted to provide insight into preservice teachers' process of negotiating meaning around a nontraditional educational practice. Each participant traveled a unique and emotional journey through the process of collaborative action research and their personal trajectory did influence the way they negotiated the practice of collaborative action research. Findings included: (a) each participant had a dominant trait that influenced areas of alignment and misalignment between their trajectory and the practice of collaborative action research; (b) some participants exhibited visible misalignments while the misalignments of others were hidden; (c) participants relied on personal strengths to reestablish the perception of alignment as they negotiated meaning through the practice of collaborative action research; (d) the way misalignments were negotiated limited the transformational potential of the learning experience of collaborative action research; and (e) participants' expectations for their future use of the practice of collaborative action research aligned with their dominant traits.

Orientador: João Augusto Gentilini / Banca: Maria Helena Galvão Frem Dias da Silva / Banca: Cleiton de Oliveira / Resumo: Nesta pesquisa de caráter empírico, procuramos investigar a percepção de 30 professores que atuam nos dois segmentos do Ensino Fundamental e no Ensino Médio da Diretoria de Ensino do Município de São Carlos, sobre o desempenho do Professor Coordenador da Escola Pública do Estado de São Paulo na busca de ações coletivas que possibilitem melhorias na qualidade de ensino, e se essas ações estão relacionadas à existência de práticas democráticas no interior das escolas. A metodologia utilizada se deu com base na análise de documentos oficiais (leis, decretos, resoluções) bem como em diversas obras de análises sobre a Reforma Educacional implantada no Estado de São Paulo na década de 1990 sobre Gestão Democrática Educacional voltada para uma perspectiva de participação colegiada, na literatura que discute a precarização do trabalho docente e na visão sindical sobre o ponto de vista da APEOESP (Sindicato dos Professores do Ensino Oficial do Estado de São Paulo) enfatizando questões sobre salário e jornada de trabalho. Realizamos também uma investigação focalizada, utilizando 11 questões do relatório produzido pela SEE/SARESP/2000, que analisa o perfil do Diretor e do Professor Coordenador na Rede Estadual Paulista, bem como 12 questões por nós elaboradas, todas agrupadas em blocos. Para a coleta dos dados utilizamos dois procedimentos: um questionário com questões fechadas, voltadas para o professor, e outro, com uma questão aberta voltada para os Professores Coordenadores. A análise realizada aponta de ambas as partes um descontentamento em relação à atuação dos Professores Coordenadores em suas escolas, que são percebidos como profissionais frágeis burocráticos e sem uma identidade profissional com seus pares. A curto prazo apresentamos duas propostas voltadas para a melhoria da qualidade de ensino e conseqüentemente para o Professor Coordenador...(Resumo completo, clicar acesso eletrônico abaixo) / Abstract: This research of empirical character investigates the perception of thirty teachers that act in two stages (elementary and high school) from São Carlos about the Coordinator Teacher's work of a São Paulo state Public School in the search of collective actions that could improve the quality of teaching and if these actions are related to the existence of democratic practices into these schools. The adopted methodology was used considering official documents (laws, decrees, resolutions) as well as several analysis literature about the Educational Reform introduced in São Paulo state during the 90's, about Democratic Educational Management turned into a perspective of collective participation and in the literature that discuss the teaching work as being precarious and in APEOESP (trade union of teachers from São Paulo state) point of view emphasizing questions about salary and work period. We have also made an aimed investigation, using eleven questions from the report produced by SEE/SARESP/2000, that analyses the profile of the head teacher and the Coordinator Teacher of a public school, as well, twelve questions elaborated by us, all of them in groups. For the two data collection we have two procedures: a questionnaire with closed questions to the teachers, and another one, with an opened question to the Coordinator Teachers. The analysis that we made shows that there are from both parts a discontent related to the way that Coordinator Teachers act in their schools. They are seen as fragile and bureaucratic teachers and without a professional identity with the other teachers. In a short period we present two ways to improve the teaching quality and with it the Coordinator Teacher will try to rescue his professional identity through yourself and the other ones by means of remodeling the educational meetings as while an important space of discussions about collective educational and in defense of a Political Educational Autonomous Project. / Mestre

The research described in this report was undertaken with four teachers of English as Home Language in two different secondary schools in Johannesburg. The researcher’s purpose was twofold: (i) to uncover the attitudes of selected grade nine teachers to the English Home Language curriculum statement for grade nine; (ii) to establish how, if at all, the Revised National Curriculum Statement featured in the teachers’ construction of the subject English as home language. The data for this case study consisted of individual teacher interviews, notes from observations in the classroom of each teacher and artefacts such as teachers’ term plans and examples of learners’ texts. Findings from an analysis of this data indicate varied understandings of and attitudes towards this curriculum statement. These have translated into equally varied implementation of the curriculum. Analysis of the teachers’ interviews gave little indication of the rich and varied learning activities that they planned and implemented. In this case study, the difference between how teachers talked about the new curriculum and how they enacted it in their classroom practice was marked.

This qualitative dissertation explored the professional learning experiences and perceived needs of four beginning high school English teachers in two NYC schools and the ways and means those needs were being addressed or not addressed. Through in-depth interviews with the teachers, my renderings from the interviews focused on how discourse shapes an understanding of the professional learning opportunities that operate as openings and constraints for teachers’ professional growth. I drew on the work of historian Michel Foucault as a theoretical framework to examine the production of a teacher’s sense of “self” as an effect of power/knowledge relations circulating within the dominant school discourses in which they are situated and the larger educational context at this historic moment.

Application of the culturally responsive teaching (CRT) initiative to practice may be challenging because each school community is unique. The individualized nature of CRT renders that research on successful CRT practices is only mildly, if at all, applicable to practicing teachers. As a result of these barriers, little is known about the process of becoming culturally responsive. The purpose of this study was to document my process in seeking to become a culturally responsive music educator. Critical Race Theory shaped this study. The emphasis on white culture in public high school choir curricula does not reflect the diverse populations in music classrooms today. Many of these classrooms are led by white teachers like myself, requiring that we interrogate our race and how often it affects the learning environment in our classrooms. Autoethnographic methods were used in this study. Three sources of data were gathered: my journal, lesson plans, and other teaching artifacts including student work. The data were then condensed into three stories: a) the story of me; b) the story of my teaching; c) the story of my students. Self-reflection, self-assessment, and self-analysis took place through questioning which included: a) “How does my whiteness affect my teaching?” b) “How often were suggestions from scholarship used?” c) “How did my attempts at culturally responsive teaching affect my students?” Through this work, I found that developing awareness of my whiteness, my biases, and assumptions, and how they influence my instructional choices was the most important step towards CRT. I often observed myself in a self-imposed binary: either I was ‘successful’ or ‘a failure’ at being culturally responsive. My disposition about CRT has changed because now I understand that teaching responsively is not a binary but a continuum. Each day I may exist in a different place on the continuum. Therefore, I will always be becoming culturally responsive. An individual’s process of becoming culturally responsive can only be learned through autoethnographic techniques. Additional autoethnographies conducted by teachers who are attempting to become culturally responsive may assist in finding trends.

This dissertation explores teacher identities as they emerge, recede and collide with one another in the classrooms of four participating English teachers at the Cooperative School, a pseudonymous, single school site that is home to the researcher as well as to the study participants. Focusing first on how these teachers see themselves and how they articulate their roles, the study then turns to an analysis based on Judith Butler's theories of identity formation. The role of normative power in identity formation is exemplified by what the paper calls "The Regime of Teacher Norms," i.e., Teacher as Expert, Teacher as Guide, Teacher as Professional and Teacher as Boss.

The embattled profession of teaching is like a sad song on repeat (Goldstein, 2015). For beyond a decade, research has proliferated a deficit narrative of teaching as a “revolving door” (Ingersoll, 2001, p. 514) or “leaky bucket” (Sutcher, Darling-Hammond, & Carver-Thomas, 2016, p. 2), in which at least 50% of teachers quit within the first 5 years (Ingersoll, Merrill, & Stuckey, 2014). In fact, as teacher attrition increases, the teacher-shortage crisis ravages our hardest-to-serve schools (Sutcher et al., 2016). Today, the number of aspiring teachers has dropped to the lowest it has been in 45 years (Flannery, 2016). The curiosity driving my research was and is whether it is possible to disrupt this deficit narrative of teaching as America’s most embattled profession (Goldstein, 2015). To do so, my goals have been to learn how eight teacher-leaders describe and understand their own flourishing in their careers, if they do at all, and what are the encouragers of and obstacles to their flourishing. In other words, rather than turn up the volume on the narrative of teachers who fail, flee, and quit the profession, I wondered how, if at all, stories exist of teachers who live, teach, and lead well. For this study, I derived the term flourishing from Aristotle’s eudemonia or the art of living well and doing well for self and others (Aristotle, 2011, line 1095b). I then crafted the beginnings of a flourishing framework for what it might mean for teacher-leaders to live the good life. Through a cross-disciplinary and integrative literature review (Torraco, 2016), I learned that flourishing most frequently includes experiencing passion, purpose, and practical wisdom in work and life. In response, I sought to examine how, if at all, eight teachers who are also leaders—both formally and informally in their schools and beyond—experience their own flourishing. To clarify, I defined teacher-leaders as teachers who I believe grew into leaders (Drago-Severson, 2016) and are “galvanized by the desire to improve and thus ensure learning for all students” and “driven to experiment, take risks, collaborate, seek feedback, and question their own and others’ practices” (Fairman & Mackenzie, 2015, p. 64). Therefore, the eight teacher-leaders for this study fit Fairman and Mackenzie’s definition. They participated in two programs that I believe are strong holding environments (Drago-Severson, 2013): North Carolina Teaching Fellows, a preservice university program for aspiring teachers, and National Board for Professional Teacher Standards, an in-service development opportunity for experienced teachers with more than 4 years of experience. To be clear, “holding environments” can be relationships and contexts that create developmentally spaces for adults to grow and feel “honored for who they are” (Drago-Severson, 2012, p. 48; Kegan, 1982, p. 115; Winnicott, 1990). The Pillar Practices of teaming, mentorship, collegial inquiry, and inviting teachers to assume leadership are four holding environment (i.e., structures) in which adults can feel well held (supported) and adequately challenged—in order to increase internal capacities (Drago-Severson, 2004, p. 88). I chose to invite teachers who participated in two teacher-development programs (i.e., North Carolina Teaching Fellows and National Board Certification) specifically because these programs seem to provide holding environments. Researchers have shown teachers who participated in these two programs are among the best and brightest or irreplaceable teacher-leaders whom schools want to keep, or retain, in our classrooms (Henry, Bastian, & Smith, 2012; Jacob, Vidyarthi, & Carroll, 2012; Petty, Good, & Handler, 2016). In fact, all eight teacher-leaders who participated in this study stayed in the profession at least ten years despite the last decade of sociopolitical flux and rising complexity of public schools (Drago-Severson, 2016). To facilitate this dissertation study, I conducted three in-depth semi-structured interviews and document analysis with each of the eight teacher-leaders who work in Wake County Public School System of North Carolina (32 hours), the 15th largest district in the nation (Hui, 2016). I asked them how they describe and understand flourishing, if they do, throughout their career, with close attention to three distinct points in the trajectory of their career, that is, in the beginning years (1-3 years), during the National Board Certification Process (during or after 4 years of teaching), and within the last academic year, which was also an election year (2016-2017). I also asked how they describe and understand the encouragers of and obstacles to their own flourishing. For data analysis, I coded verbatim transcripts from these in-depth interviews with Dedoose in two analytic cycles (Maxwell, 2013; Miles, Huberman, & Saldaña, 2014; Seidman, 2013). In the first cycle, I completed open/descriptive and theoretical coding, and, in the second, I looked for categories and broader themes to display the data in narrative summaries and profiles for each participant (n = 8). Throughout, I attended to research bias, reactivity, and validity threats through analytic memos, member checks, discrepant data, and inter-coder reliability with my sponsor. Findings from this qualitative in-depth interview study and document analysis contributed to a framework of understanding flourishing for teacher-leaders. Overall, I learned that to flourish, or to teach, lead, and live well, for the eight teacher-leader participants in my study, the good life meant that they needed to prioritize the purpose of relating with students (n = 8), as I claimed in Chapter V; cultivate connections with colleagues who share common passions (n = 8), as I claimed in Chapter VI; and reflect with their practical wisdom on their priority to teach well in the midst of the push and pull of leadership entangled in flourishing (n = 8), as I claimed in Chapter VII. The implications and recommendations for policy, research, and practice from these claims and findings based on these eight teacher-leader participants are as follows: 1. to re-story excellence in teaching by creating teacher pipelines, development programs, and measurement tools (policy and research) that consider holistic frames of teacher excellence to include flourishing (i.e., do the teachers believe they are committed to teaching, leading, and living well?); 2. to re-center relationships in schools, especially for teachers, by intentionally crafting spaces such as holding environments where teachers, principals, and all educational leaders can grow their internal capacities to deepen relationships with students and colleagues; and 3. to re-frame the tides of teacher-leadership and consider the practical wisdom and time it takes for teachers to discern their own priories, their own balance, and their own flow (i.e., push and pull) of leadership based on their own understanding of their ability to teach and live well. In conclusion, I offer a beginning model and framework for teacher-leader flourishing in order for future research to explore how, if at all, teachers in different districts and states or of different demographics and levels might describe and understand their own good life.

Professional development (PD) is often viewed as essential to improve classroom practices--as a way to create changes in districts, changes in classrooms, and changes in teachers--which, in turn, strives to improve student learning. Many insist that for a PD initiative to be successful, it needs to create changes in teachers’ classroom practices, who are indeed at the ground level of interpreting, implementing, adapting, and enacting what PD offers. Researchers claim that teacher resistance is the central problem of PD failure (Janas, 1998). Confined to the duality of compliance vs. resistance to PD, teachers either change or do not change according to the grading system that the administrators and researchers impose. A binary view of teachers who meet the expectations and those who do not meet the expectations of the district and PD personnel is, then, inadequate to studying the process of what happens beyond that narrow conception of teachers who participate in district/school-wide PD. V. Richardson (2003) argues that teacher resistance is a symptom of a disconnect between a structural reform agenda and teachers’ concern for teaching students well. Within the context of a locally initiated PD program that included elements of effective PD proposed by a body of research, I examined a select group of participating teachers’ experiences. Based on the classroom practice of a teacher whose students have shown drastic growth on high stakes tests despite social factors, the district had expanded the program as a district-wide initiative. Using care theory, I specifically explored changes in 12 teachers’ beliefs and practices as a result of their PD participation, in addition to identifying factors that facilitated program implementation. The results showed that the “caring teacher” identity mediated classroom practice changes, that teachers selectively used PD based on the feedback from their students rather than changes to their knowledge and beliefs. Based on this reciprocity, teachers’ self-identification as caring teachers defies traditional labeling of participating members as “compliant” or “resistant”; all teachers in the study described how caring about and caring for their students led to program implementation with a varying degree of fidelity.