Education Commons^™

Student Engagement In Junior High World Languages Classes, John Brittain

Doctor of Education in Teacher Leadership Dissertations

This study is a qualitative case study that sought to explore the perspectives of World Languages students and teachers on student engagement in relation to the teachers’ instructional choices. Five kinds of engagement and three components of Self Determination Theory were studied in relation to student behavior. The study involved eighth and ninth grade students who are currently taking a course in a World Language in a junior high school. The researcher used interviews, classroom observations, and focus groups to collect data. The data was analyzed using a combination of computer software and analysis by hand. The findings showed that …

How Backstories Influence The Way Teachers Speak To And About Traumatized Students: A Case Study, Keona Nicole Griffin-King

All Theses, Dissertations, and Capstone Projects

Many students experience or have experienced both Adverse Community Environments and Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) (Alive and Well STL, 2021). When students come to school having experienced these ACEs they may be operating from the survival region of the brain. The four conditions of the survival brain are fight, flight, fright, or fawn. (Alive & Well STL, 2021). These conditions cause behaviors that may appear to teachers as misbehavior, classroom disruption, and rule breaking. These misunderstandings and misinterpretations may be due to teachers’ lack of knowledge about their students and specifically about their traumas, current and past (Griffin-King, 2022). Additional …

Building And Maintaining Sanctuary Spaces Through Face To Face Writing Assessment, Jeffrey Austin, Ann Burke, Ellen Foley, Gretchen Rumohr

Teaching/Writing: The Journal of Writing Teacher Education

Seasoned secondary and college instructors discuss successful face-to-face assessment, especially in virtual settings. F2F assessment frees educators to co-create equitable literacy learning experiences with students, encourages agency, demystifies the grading process, develops the classroom community, and brings meaningful inquiry about writers’ own skills and practices, ultimately disrupting inequities and inequalities of traditional grading and creating “sanctuary spaces” for all writers.

Using Critical Environmental Agency To Engage Teachers In Local Watersheds Through Water Quality Citizen Science, Lacey D. Huffling, Heather Scott

Department of Middle Grades and Secondary Education Faculty Publications

This qualitative study explores teachers’ critical environmental agency (CEA) through deepening content knowledge, engaging in identity development, developing a critical consciousness of place, and moving toward civic action. We explored the meanings secondary science teachers made of an on-going professional development (PD) situated in the Okefenokee Swamp (unique ecosystem that drains to Gulf of Mexico and Atlantic Ocean) and focused on local watershed citizen science monitoring and the global implications of all water being connected. Data analyses focused on how the nineteen teachers’ experiences and meanings were leveraged to develop CEA and the constraints that restricted their CEA development. Our …

Nurturing Excellence: A Case Study Of High School Learning Environments For The Gifted, Ryan A. Mcclintock

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The nuanced and complex cognitive and social-emotional needs of high school gifted learners are not sufficiently met through accelerated coursework like Advanced Placement and International Baccalaureate alone. Addressing their needs requires the design, implementation, and leadership of programming that maximizes their agency, curiosity, and confidence. Such programming should be fully modern in its conception and allow gifted high school students to construct and share products of their learning with respect to issues of global importance. The purpose of this study was to explore high school learning environments designed to maximize the agency, confidence, and curiosity of gifted and talented secondary …

A Critical Examination Of Secondary Teachers’ Perceptions Of Liberatory Pd, Christine C. Moore

Theses and Dissertations

This study sought to develop an understanding of secondary teachers’ perceptions of liberatory (justice-oriented) professional development at three school sites in a single school district. As participants shared their perceptions, three significant themes emerged; they described 1) facing contextual constraints that limited their agency 2) desiring to be reframed as knowledge producers, yet 3) struggling to envision how their agency could support their liberation. These key findings led to an emergent theory of the Cycle of Professional Development Stagnation, a cycle involving barriers that perpetuate the framing of teachers as passive recipients of knowledge. As evidenced in this qualitative …

How Two High School Teachers Conceive Of Student Voice, Value It, And Foster It, Katherine Mary Mccleary

Graduate Research Theses & Dissertations

The purpose of this qualitative, exploratory study was to examine two high school English teachers’ experience as they worked together to purposefully implement increased student voice in their classrooms. The study focused on how a convenience sample of teachers designed, implemented, and reflected upon classroom assignments and lessons with the intention to increase student voice and ownership in the classroom. Teachers each participated in four individual interviews, four partnership observations and three classroom observations as they related to student voice implementation.

Data from the interviews, partnership observations and classroom observations were analyzed using qualitative methods and through the lenses of …

Teaching Peer Feedback As Ethical Practice, Derek Miller, Troy Hicks, Susan Golab

Language Arts Journal of Michigan

Even with weeks of building a classroom community and deliberate instructional scaffolding, students may not engage in thoughtful peer review. One teacher discovers how he must place a deep, intentional value on the feedback itself—and the writers who provided it to one another.

Asking The Tough Questions: Teaching Literature And Nonfiction Through Critical Literacy To Recapture Our Voices, Agency, And Mission, Elsie L. Olan, Wendy Farkas, Kia Jane Richmond

Conference Presentations

Exploding the Myth of Mental Illness

Self-Regulated Learning In A Rural, South-Central Kentucky Middle School, Tammy Dungan Board

Online Theses and Dissertations

Self-regulated learning is a phenomenon recognized in nations with positive results on international assessments, such as the PISA (Program for International Student Assessment; IES, 2012). This qualitative, non-evaluative study sought to determine the presence of self-regulated learning in a rural middle school in the south-central United States by utilizing a phenomenological approach.

Self-regulated learning is a practice based upon the constructivist learning theories championed by theorists such as Bandura (1995) and Vygotsky (1978). Zimmerman (1990) coined the term self-regulated learning, which reflects a method by which students are responsible for their own learning through four stages: pre-planning, monitoring for progress, …