Education Commons^™

Advocating For A Transitional Bilingual Education Program For English Language Learners, Sandy Ozimek

Policy Advocacy

This paper examined the development and implementation of a small Illinois school district’s English Language Learner policy, which advocated for the use of a Transitional Bilingual Education program. A number of challenges were addressed to provide English Language Learners with the same opportunity to attain high levels of academic achievement as English proficient students. Common English Language Learner program models were examined, and research that supported or refuted using students’ native language to aid in the acquisition of English was considered. An implementation plan addressed these challenges and an assessment plan ensured the policy met its intended goals so all …

Paperless Debate: The Wave Of The Future, Michael B. Greenstein

Program Evaluation

This paper details a complete program evaluation of a high school debate team’s transition from debating with paper to paperless debate. The study examines if switching to debate without paper has improved the success of the debate team by focusing on the team’s winning percentage, the cost of debate travel and participation, as well as the debaters’ views of the ease of debating before and after the paperless transition. The paper concludes that the transition was indeed a success, because it increased the team’s win percentage (though not by a statistically significant margin), saved the team thousands of dollars, and …

Understanding How Service-Learning Impacts The Dispositions Of Teach For America Candidates And Their Students, Dymaneke Mitchell, Sy Karlin, Todd Alan Price

Faculty Publications

This article is based on a study that assessed Teach for America (TFA) candidates’ dispositions toward service-learning before and after they developed and implemented a service-learning project with their students. This article may be used to understand the significance of raising alternative certification teacher candidates’ community awareness so that they may stay longer as teachers while also becoming more acculturated to their school and neighborhood surroundings. The authors assert that candidates will become more effective through carefully planned service-learning experiences with community partners and become better service and public education advocates.

Enhancement And The Launch Of Odyssey, Jason Pascavage

Dissertations

The Change Leadership Plan utilizes student data garnered from the Program Evaluation to assist in the creation and implementation of the 'Enhancement' program. The Enhancement program is a research-based in-school student intervention developed in response to over two-thirds of Brooks Middle School students falling short of district College and Career Readiness (CCR) benchmarks. College and Career Readiness at Brooks Middle School is based on student outcomes from the fall, winter, and spring MAP® assessments. The vision behind the Enhancement program is to lessen the achievement gap while utilizing student results to assign individual learning paths and curriculum to specific students …

Planning For Change While Changing The Plan: A Case Study Of Staff Perceptions Of An Elementary Ell Program Redesign, Joanne Panopoulos

Dissertations

This study shows how I, the leader, conceptualized and implemented a program redesign over the course of two years (2009-11). At the time of this study I was faced with multiple factors which led to the inspiration for change: (a) the relatively rapid increase in the number of students needing ELL services, (b) a growing teacher concern for ELLs performing in the core academic areas, and (c) greater emphasis on improving level of English proficiency and overall academic performance for placement purposes in the ELL program and in the regular education class, and (d) the change of exit criteria in …

The Community College As Entrepreneur: Developing And Sustaining Effective Noncredit Workforce Training Partnerships, Kristine Michele Condon

Dissertations

In an era of increasingly tight community college budgets, noncredit workforce training partnerships with local business and industry are becoming critical sources of revenue. These partnerships can underwrite otherwise unaffordable projects and build effective bridges from non-credit to credit-bearing coursework for students. However, little research exists on the nature of community college noncredit workforce training partnerships or how those partnerships are built and maintained.

The purpose of this study is to identify how and in what ways Illinois single-campus community colleges develop and sustain effective noncredit workforce training partnerships. This qualitative case study of Illinois’ single-campus community colleges and their …

Indicators Of Quality And Child Outcomes In Family Child Care, Mccormick Center For Early Childhood Leadership

McCormick Center for Early Childhood Leadership Publications

While there has been considerable research on the indicators of quality in center-based early childhood programs, there is scant research on the correlates of quality in family child care. A recent study was conducted to increase our understanding of the relationship between indicators of quality and child outcomes in the context of family child care. The study addressed two questions. 1) What provider-level characteristics predict observed quality practices? 2) Are quality practices and providers’ professional attitudes and beliefs associated with children’s pre-academic and social-emotional skills? To answer these questions, the researchers conducted a secondary analysis of data collected in 2004 …

Complexity And Complicity: Quality(S) And/Or Effectiveness In Teacher Education, Todd Alan Price

Faculty Publications

The period spanning 2001 to 2015 could best be characterized in the words “shock and awe” in the United States of America. During this tumultuous time, the public good was placed under increasingly austere measures as a direct result of war, widespread financial speculation, and crash of the financial, investment, and real estate market(s). Subsequently, a banking industry bailout of epic proportions - shouldered disproportionately by average American taxpayers - led to political upheavals, and an increasingly divided body politic. Public education was severely impacted. With the No Child Left Behind Act (2002) school districts were placed under audit and …

Democracy Education: The Radical Teaching, Learning, And Doing Of Tao Xingzhi, Todd A. Price Dr.

Faculty Publications

The apex of China’s 1911 Republican Revolution, the election in Nanjing of native son Dr. Sun Yat-sen, heralded an historic break with autocracy. Tragically, Sun Yat-Sen’s democracy did not last long. A bitter period of feudal strife followed as warlords sought to carve fiefdoms out of the young republic. Humiliating concessions to Japan under the Versailles Treaty added to the new republic’s problems. Continuing violation of China’s sovereignty spawned the May 4th, 1919 student movement in Peking. Reverberations from May 4th helped launch a small communist party cell in Shanghai and a larger democracy movement across the country.

Trenchant feudalism, …

Unpacking The Language Of Stem For English Language Learners, Kristin Lems, Jason Stegemoller

Faculty Publications

This article is a follow-up to a workshop we presented at STEMTech 2013 entitled “Unpacking the language of STEM for English language learners.” We chose this topic because, in our roles as co-directors of the ESL STEM Success Grant (a 5 year national professional development grant from the Office of English Language Acquisition, U.S. Department of Education), we have been exploring ways that teachers across the grade levels can rise to the challenge of more effectively teaching English language learners (ELLs) in the STEM disciplines. (STEM, of course, stands for Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics.) When teachers embed their understandings …