Education Commons^™

When Policy Is Practice: Sde Effort To Help/Transform/Label Low-Performing Schools, April (Aprille) J. Phillips

Department of Teaching, Learning, and Teacher Education: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Policymakers have long been infatuated with education reform (Berliner & Biddle, 1995; Stein, 2004), including at the state level (Lusi, 1997). Consistent with this longer tradition, the Nebraska State Legislature (a.k.a. the ‘Unicameral’) passed Legislative Bill 438 (LB 438) in 2014, providing a statutory outline for a new education accountability system for the state that authorized the State Board of Education (SBOE) to intervene priority schools through the work of an intervention.

This ethnographically informed, exploratory policy implementation study (Creswell, 2013; Hamann & Rosen, 2011; Levinson & Sutton, 2001; Patton, 2002; Schwandt, 2001; Shore & Wright, 1997; Stake, 1978) examines …

Educational Development Efforts Aligned With The Assessment Cycle, Phyllis Blumberg

To Improve the Academy: A Journal of Educational Development

Using an assessment cycle as an organizing framework, this article illustrates how educational development and assessment mutually complement each other. It describes an assessment study conducted to determine if two colleges at a small university met their strategic goals to increase the adoption of learning-centered teaching. This study served the parallel function of assessing the impact of sustained educational development efforts by the Centers for Teaching and Learning (CTL) to promote learning-centered teaching. The majority of interviewed faculty reported using learning-centered approaches. The data collection method itself also served as a teachable moment for faculty who do not attend CTL …