Leadership And Teacher Agency For Inclusive Classrooms: Insights About Integrating Students With Disabilities Into Inclusive Classrooms From Teachers And School Leaders In Three International Schools, Chad Wood

Dissertations

As international schools continue to flourish, they must consider how to be inclusive and meet the needs not only of multicultural populations of students, but also the needs of students with diagnosed learning difficulties (i.e., students with special needs). Promoting teacher agency is a potentially important component in successfully implementing inclusive practices given that teachers are key actors in the implementation process. Currently, however, there is limited empirical evidence regarding the interconnectedness of teacher agency and inclusion of special needs populations in international schools.

This qualitative research explores the role of school leaders in promoting teacher agency to support the …

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 …

Fostering Students' Critical Consciousness As Decolonizing Practice Within An Ethnic Studies Framework, Fatima Hansia

Education | Master's Theses

This research explored how teachers were teaching critical consciousness as decolonizing pedagogy within Tolteka R. Cuauhtin’s Ethnic Studies Framework (Cuauhtin, 2019b) at an alternative education high school. Critical consciousness—an expansive term developed by Paolo Freire in the 1960s—advocates for a problem-posing approach to education that includes essential elements of praxis (reflection and action), development of holistic humanity, critical examination of the processes of violence and power, and social-justice oriented self-empowerment among students that leads to actionable community change (Freire, 2005). Even though the conceptualization of Ethnic Studies as a theoretical framework is strong, there is a lack of existing studies …

“How Am I A Maker Making A Makerspace?” : A Focus On Teachers In Practice Self-Authoring As Makers In Constrained K-8 Spaces, Bridget Looney

Theses, Dissertations and Culminating Projects

Although there has been an abundance of empirical inquiry into making in recent years, interestingly, and despite growing interest in the integration of making into N-12 education, little seems to be known empirically about the ways in which teachers are implementing making and creating makerspaces in their own classrooms. Very little direct attention has been paid to ‘pioneer’ N-12 teachers who are engaging students in making. This gap in the research obscures our understanding of how teachers think about making, how they practice as teachers and makers, and how their school context might influence their teaching and making practices. This …

General Education Elementary Teacher Competencies And Training In Teaching Children With Autism In The U.S. Virgin Islands, Merle Merinda Elizabeth Durand

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

The number of students diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is increasing. The overall problem in this study focused on showing how a lack of teacher training in ASD-specific courses could result in a lack of competencies in meeting the educational needs of children with autism in an inclusive setting. The purpose of this nonexperimental quantitative cross-sectional study was to determine if a difference exists in four teaching competencies among general education elementary teachers teaching children with autism in the general education classroom in the U.S. Virgin Islands based training. The theoretical framework was grounded in Medley’s teaching competence theory …

Teacher Resilience, Kristen Whipple

Murray State Theses and Dissertations

Abstract

The main purpose of this quantitative research study was to explore the influences that impact teacher resilience. Seven factors that potentially protect teacher resilience were chosen: competency, self-efficacy, agency, relationships, organizational culture, altruism, and sense of humor. These factors were tested against years of service categories and self-perceived resilience scores to determine if relationships exist. A two-part online survey gathered demographic information, self-perceived resilience scores, and resilience factor data from American PreK-12 teachers. To answer the three guiding research questions, the statistical tests of multiple linear regression, Pearson’s r correlation coefficient, and chi-square test of independence were utilized. The …

A Community Of Practice Approach To Teacher Learning, Jayne L. Tanis

Theses, Dissertations and Culminating Projects

Teacher effectiveness has been targeted by government agencies and educational think tanks for raising student achievement and providing equitable education for all. Exploring how teachers enacted their development of practice in a teacher-initiated learning community of practice to improve student achievement in mathematics exposed mediating factors responsible for teacher learning. This qualitative study drew upon Aristotle’s discussion of phronesis and Lave and Wenger’s (1991) concept of legitimate peripheral participation to interpret how artifacts produced within and across communities of practice reified the elements of collaborative teacher learning that lead to changes in instructional practice during a reform initiative. These findings …

Grassroots Professional Learning : The Homegrown And Human Dimensions Of Teacher Learning, Heather A. Frank Matteo

Theses, Dissertations and Culminating Projects

This qualitative study was prompted by the current climate of teacher accountability and educational reform efforts focused on teacher quality and effectiveness in the U.S. Initiatives, at both the national and state levels, reflect top-down professional development policies that tend to prioritize one-size-fits-all approaches to teacher development and ultimately serve to deprofessionalize teachers. As a result, little attention has been paid to understanding teachers’ professional learning in a grassroots sense. Therefore, the purpose of this study was to examine how a group of elementary school teachers of literacy engaged collectively in grassroots professional learning in the context of top-down professional …

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 …

An Examined Life Of A Language Teacher Of Chinese: An Autoethnographic Investigation Into Agency, Ying Zhang

Doctoral Dissertations

There is a paucity of research about and done by L2 Chinese educators regarding the theoretical construct of agency. It is also noted that the qualitative inquiry is marginalized in L2 Chinese research field, let alone the narrative study of the agency of experienced by L2 Chinese-teachers. In this dissertation research, I aim at filling in the gap by conducting a longitudinal autoethnography which captures over a decade (1997-2017) of my personal and professional development with an agency perspective. The highly personalized autoethnographic accounts open up my personal and professional life as an experienced, college-level, transnational, early 40’s female native …

Performance Feedback: How Structure, Culture, And Agency Affects Feedback, Angelica Sleiman

Dissertations

Federal and state mandates have placed an added pressure on teachers to demonstrate “effective” instructional practices. These mandates also affect the role of a principal, as an evaluator of “effective” instructional strategies, and as an instructional leader who continuously needs to build teacher capacity to satisfy these mandates. Accountability mandates promise to improve students’ academic performance but they have lacked professional development that would provide the support teachers and principals need to achieve success. Feedback is arguably a valuable mechanism to build teacher capacity and respond to accountability pressures, however, the implementation of feedback and its consequences for teacher’s professional …

Black Mothers' Counter-Narratives Of Agency: A Pulse On Racism And Parent Involvement Strategies In Twenty First Century Schools, Sharnee N. Brown

Seton Hall University Dissertations and Theses (ETDs)

This qualitative study examined African American mothers’ perceptions of their children’s schools (public, charter, and private) within the context of institutional, structural, and individual racism. Employing qualitative techniques, interviews and focus groups of middle to lower working class Black mothers were conducted to explore their lived experiences with individual, institutional, and structural racism within American schools. The goal of this study was to learn how these mothers make meaning of the educational institutions that serve their children, the racial barriers they encountered and the strategies of contestation they employed in order to address these perceived barriers.

The results of the …

A Mixed Methods Study: The Impact Of Self-Regulated Learning On L2 Writing And Strategy Use, Mohammed Almazloum

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This convergent mixed methods study aimed to find out how a self-regulated learning (SRL) instructional intervention could impact the Palestinian students’ second language (L2) writing and strategy use. L2 writers face common writing challenges, including but not limited to a lack of competences, effective writing approach, proactive planning, motivation, and self-efficacy (Hammad, 2016). Helping the students to overcome their challenges, improve their L2 writing, and become self-regulated writers was an expected outcome of the study. The study was informed by the social cognitive theory of SRL that views successful writers as proactive and self-regulated learners. In the quantitative part, a …

Interpreting, Stephanie Jo Kent

Doctoral Dissertations

What do community interpreting for the Deaf in western societies, conference interpreting for the European Parliament, and language brokering in international management have in common? Academic research and professional training have historically emphasized the linguistic and cognitive challenges of interpreting, neglecting or ignoring the social aspects that structure communication. All forms of interpreting are inherently social; they involve relationships among at least three people and two languages. The contexts explored here, American Sign Language/English interpreting and spoken language interpreting within the European Parliament, show that simultaneous interpreting involves attitudes, norms and values about intercultural communication that overemphasize information and discount …