Elementary Education and Teaching Commons^™

Reflection In Alignment To Professional Standards: What Did The Student Teachers Highlight?, Ping Liu

Journal of Global Education and Research

This study investigates the professional development of elementary student teachers in a teacher education program. Student teaching is a process for pre-service teachers to apply learning in an authentic school context, and one critical aspect of professional development is through reflection. The participants were primarily examined through their weekly reflections on teaching and learning experiences over an eight-week period. Using the state Standards for the Teaching Profession as a framework, the student teachers chose to reflect on topics they were most interested in exploring. Results indicated that the participants gave predominant attention to classroom management; the standards that received the ...

Engagement In Music Education In The Upper Elementary Grades, Abigail Jirik

Dissertations, Theses, and Projects

The research was based on observations from the researcher’s time in the elementary music classroom and addresses the decline of willingness to participate in students in the upper elementary grades. The research addresses the following two research questions; how do family and student attitudes and dynamics towards singing affect student participation in singing in elementary music class? And in what ways could singing be presented and included in instruction to better engage the older elementary learner? The researcher selected fourth and fifth grade students as the participants in the study. Students were given surveys asking questions about participation and ...

Reimagining An Elementary Teacher Education Preparation Program: Striving For Integrated Teaching, Benjamin Boche, Selina Bartels, Douglas Wassilak

Educational Considerations

Despite elementary teacher education programs preparing preservice teachers in the main content areas of literacy, math, science, and social studies, few elementary school classrooms teach all four content areas on a regular and thorough basis. Therefore, elementary education teacher preparation programs should be redesigned to support an integrated teaching model of all four content areas in order to better prepare preservice teachers (PST) to serve elementary students. The main research question for this study was "How does a collaborative and integrated elementary education program impact PSTs’ knowledge and understanding of an integrated K-6 elementary classroom?" The sample included 12 preservice ...

Professional Learning Opportunities For Teacher Candidates, Victoria N. Seeger, Chad Boyles

Educational Considerations

Using a case study model, the research explored how teacher candidates viewed professional learning, its impact on undergraduate preparation for the teaching profession, and what kind of role it was perceived to play by early-career teachers. Research participants responded to questions about how the professional learning impacted their views on preparation for teaching, how experiences influenced discussions with interviewers prior to being hired, and how professional learning prepared them for interacting with colleagues and administrators. The participants’ perceptions were explored through surveys and focus groups.

An Evaluation Of One School's Reading Program To Support Struggling Readers Through The Use Of Data, Gabrielle Jones

Dissertations

ABSTRACT

The purpose of this study is to evaluate the efficacy of one school’s reading intervention program, and its impact on struggling readers reading performance. Participants in this study included administrators, Grades 3 through 5instructional staff that directly impact student learning in reading through reading instruction. I collected survey data and analyzed it to determine teachers’ ability to instruct struggling readers with high expectations for student learning. As a result, this evaluation exhibit teachers require more quality planning time to prepare effective reading intervention lessons that includes strategies attained from strategically designed professional development structured to increase students’ reading ...

Embracing The Emergent Nature Of Research In Early Childhood Education And In Life, Anna Malyukova

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This work investigates the emergent nature of research on emotions and wellness in early childhood education and in life. The research discussed in this thesis was emergent and contingent. Through my experiences as an educator, student, mother, human being living through a pandemic, and daughter, I embraced opportunities for research in various fields of my life.

I explore teaching research to early childhood teachers who also became my coresearchers in a project that explores our roles of being teachers | researchers. Together, using a hermeneutic-phenomenological approach, we learn about the experiences of those participating in the research projects, both individually and ...

Pedagogy And Love: Preservice Teacher Perspectives, Eleni Stellatos

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis argues for the inclusion of positive discipline, culturally relevant pedagogy, and love in both preservice teacher and educational leadership programs. The significance of fostering relationships in a school community are discussed with qualitative data gathered from recent teacher preparation program graduates.

The Chimera: Multiple Selves, Conflicting Desires, And Fluctuating Power Relations In Qualitative Research, Su Jung Um

The Qualitative Report

In this article, I (re)constructed and (re)presented a dialogic inquiry among my chimeric selves engaged in a study which I conducted from 2013 to 2017 to examine teaching experiences of graduates from a social justice-oriented preservice program. I interrogated the roles of my different, disparate, and discontinuous selves in the research process – as a former teacher, a former instructor of my research participants, a researcher with particular academic and political opinions, and as a foreigner working toward a doctoral degree from/in a U.S. higher education institution. In this article, I demonstrated how my chimeric selves with ...

Elementary Teacher Adaptations To Engineering Curricula To Leverage Student And Community Resources, Jennifer L. Chiu, Sarah J. Fick, Kevin W. Mcelhaney, Nonye Alozie, Reina Fujii

Journal of Pre-College Engineering Education Research (J-PEER)

This paper addresses an important consideration for promoting equitable engineering instruction: understanding how teachers contextualize curricular materials to draw upon student and community resources. We present a descriptive case study of two 5th grade teachers who co-designed a Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS)-aligned curricular unit that integrated science, engineering, and computational modeling. The five-week project challenged students to redesign their school grounds to reduce water runoff and increase accessibility for students with disabilities. The teachers implemented the project with one Grade 5 class with a large proportion of students having individualized learning plans and cultural backgrounds minoritized in science ...

The Counterculture Generation: Idolized, Appropriated, And Misunderstood, Rina R. Bousalis

The Councilor: A Journal of the Social Studies

Students today possess the impression that all members of the 1960s-70s counterculture generation, or hippies, were long-haired radicals who engaged in deviant behavior. This is attributable to the way media has portrayed youth from this era. Contemporary youth have appropriated the counterculture style without understanding the movement. Businesses transformed the hippies into symbolic commodities, thus reducing their historical significance. This paper describes the implications of this shift and how educators should go beyond the emblematic symbols to teach the counterculture movement in a meaningful way.

Inquiry: Tragic Journeys Of Enslaved African People Exposed Through Shipwreck Archaeology, Janie Hubbard

The Councilor: A Journal of the Social Studies

This article describes an inquiry lesson, recommended for upper elementary and middle level students. One primary aim of the lesson is to explore shipwreck archeology to focus on the overseas journeys of enslaved African people during the transatlantic slave trade. A second aim is for students to recognize how the slave trade’s exploiters caused sustained damage to the principles of Black equality, producing systemic racism for centuries and into contemporary times. In this lesson, students inquire and discover nuanced information about the historic slave trade by studying clues from sunken slave ships. Students begin by closely observing artifacts found ...

Silencing Students' Voices In An Era Of Academic Language, Aida Nevárez-La Torre

Journal of Multilingual Education Research

No abstract provided.

The Motivation And Attitude Of Arab Heritage Children And Their Parents’ Perspectives Toward Learning Arabic, Nada Naji

Theses and Dissertations

Due to the unstable circumstances in the Middle East in the last decade, a large number of immigrants from Arab origins immigrated to non-Arab countries. This immigration created a new generation of Arab heritage learners who want to learn the Arabic language as a heritage language for different reasons. This study investigates the motivation and attitude of Arab heritage children between 10 and 16 years of age and their parents’ perspectives toward learning Arabic as a heritage language in host countries. 143 participants (92 parents, 51 children) living in 17 different non-Arab countries have participated in this study. The method ...

Uncommon And Non-Traditional Urban Relationship Strategies: From Relationship Loss To Relationship Recovery, Lasonya L. Moore

Journal of English Learner Education

With increasing student diversity across our nation, there is a growing need to scale up educational innovations related to building holistic relationships. Many students in K-12 public schools enter educational settings with uncommon and nontraditional ways of building and developing longitudinal relationships that allow students to thrive and not just survive. Specifically, teachers/educators feel ill-equipped and ill-trained to adequately support the increasing number of English learners(ELs) and Exceptional education students (specifically Students of Color (SOC) with emotional and behavioral disorders) identified in inclusive classrooms. Thus, there remains an urgent need to share uncommon and non-traditional strategies to develop ...

A Call For A Third Wave Of Ethnic Studies Curriculum. A Book Review Of Transformative Ethnic Studies In Schools: Curriculum, Pedagogy, & Research, Robert G. Unzueta Ii

Democracy and Education

Transformative Ethnic Studies in Schools: Curriculum, Pedagogy, & Research calls on our faculty, educators, community members, students, activists, and allies to usher in the third wave of ethnic studies curriculum into compulsory school conversation. At the center of ethnic studies curriculum, according to the authors, is a push for the humanization of our most dehumanized students in our society. At a time when institutions are grappling with how to move forward in response to the multiple national pandemics, this text offers a practical, sustainable, and evidence-based research, why we need ethnic studies curriculum in every classroom, including STEM.

Creating A Democratic Mathematics Classroom: The Interplay Of The Rights And Responsibilities Of The Learner, Priya V. Prasad, Crystal Kalinec-Craig

Democracy and Education

One way in which democratic classrooms can reflect a democracy is by guaranteeing students some inalienable rights; Kalinec-Craig (2017) outlined Olga Torres’s Rights of the Learner (Torres’s RotL) in mathematics classrooms. However, democracies rely not only on citizens’ rights, but on their willingness to take up certain responsibilities as well. We extend this idea to mathematics classrooms to explore the consequences of the interplay of learners’ rights and responsibilities, in the context of the preparation of elementary mathematics teachers. In addition, we explore ways in which learners may overexercise their rights of the learner or opt out of ...

Technology As A Tool For Support: Classroom Teachers And Resource Specialists In Collaboration And Communication Practices, Mackenzie Jones

Master of Science in Education | Master's Theses

Classroom teachers and resource specialists face hectic schedules that include supporting students and meeting the core curriculum standards. In order to support students with disabilities in the classroom, collaboration between classroom teachers and resource specialists is essential. With busy schedules and increasing demands that teachers face, there is an urgent need to support teachers with effective systems of collaboration. This research focuses on the problem of unorganized and ineffective systems of support, which teachers face when trying to collaborate and communicate with their colleagues. While many prior studies address the significance of providing time for educators to collaborate in the ...

Implementation Of Culturally Relevant Teaching In Namibian Classrooms: Understanding Impediments And Identifying Assets, Fransisko Constantino

Master of Science in Education | Master's Theses

Culturally responsive pedagogy (CRP) is a teaching approach that can be utilized to improve academic outcomes among diverse student populations. Currently, however, there is a lack of research examining why some teachers struggle to implement CRP, particularly in educational contexts beyond the U.S. This study examined why there is a lack of implementation of CRP within combined schools in the Kavango East region of Namibia. More specifically, this study assessed the role of CRP within Namibian English Second Language (ESL) classrooms and examined how the experiences of ESL teachers affected their ability to implement CRP. In addition, this study ...

Differentiated Spelling: Using Small Group Instruction, Sara Broughton

Masters of Education in Teaching and Learning

Spelling instruction is often overlooked by many teachers during reading and language arts. The purpose of this study was to implement a manageable differentiated word study instruction program, drawn from the Words Their Way (WTW) program, to determine how it affected students’ spelling accuracy and how the participants perceived its effect on students’ daily journal writing time in a fourth-grade self-contained classroom. Students were placed into small groups based on their spelling pre-test scores. Data was collected through field notes, student and teacher interviews, a pre- and post-test, and a survey. Qualitative data was analyzed using the constant comparative method ...

“Math Talks Are Like An Alarm Clock Waking You Up”: Language’S Crucial Role In Mathematics, Ella Wasser

Masters of Education in Teaching and Learning

Whole group math talks, or number talks, are a common practice to get students talking about their own understanding of mathematical concepts. The purpose of this study was to implement math talks in small group settings to see what would happen, specifically to students’ conceptual understanding as well their general perceptions of math talks. This study took place in a fourth-grade math classroom, and math talks were implemented with the whole class for a week and then moved to small groups for the remaining three weeks of the study. During the study, a pre-and post-assessment was given, field notes were ...