Education Commons^™

Building Resiliency With Students Of Color During The Pandemic: Providing Remote After-School Activities, John Bell, Marcus Mcdonald

Journal of Practitioner Research

As two Black male teachers, we knew the risks for our Black male students in our culture and the importance of keeping them safe and attending school. Keeping our students involved in our school community took on a new urgency when the pandemic hit and the country struggled with racial issues after the shooting of unarmed Black men and women. We adapted our after-school mentoring and leadership programs (that had been f2f) for young Black males and transformed them to after-school remote platforms. Secondary students participated in a remote football practice and training program. They were able to socialize …

Teachers As Instructional Designers: Unearthing The Essence Of The Primary School Curriculum For Delivery Within The Remote Learning Classroom, Angela Gonzalez, Michael Poole

Journal of Practitioner Research

Moving our elementary curriculum to emergency remote instruction presented numerous challenges to our elementary school, as teachers recognized that elementary-age children could not be expected to spend the amount of time on computer screens that they had spent in face-to-face classrooms. Working with our colleagues, we adopted a “less is more” approach, using inquiry processes to make systematic and informed choices as to which state standards would be covered. We acted as instructional designers to develop coherent learning units for remote instruction, using inquiry processes to study the effectiveness of our lessons and adjust instruction accordingly. This work could only …

A Quest For More Equitable Experiences For All Students During A Global Pandemic: An Inquiry Into Remote Delivery Of De-Tracked Chemistry And Biology Classes, Mayra Cordero, Elizabeth Davis

Journal of Practitioner Research

Through our collaboration, we helped one another rethink and adapt the delivery of our de-tracked science courses for remote instruction as we finished out the 2019-2020 school year, with a particular focus on developing remote instruction practices that would support our learners struggling in our secondary science de-tracked classrooms. We derived three actions to take to target the needs of our students who struggled and to differentiate our instruction. We reduced the amount of material being covered to allow for deeper dives into content, prioritized depth of learning over breadth of learning; connected our remote lessons to our students’ real-world …

Students’ Lived Experiences During The Pandemic: Their Expressions Through Art And Poetry, Blake Beckett, Susan I. Johnson

Journal of Practitioner Research

Blake, a language arts teacher, and Susan, a visual arts teacher, were both committed to connect our students’ lived experiences of the pandemic with their academic learning in our new virtual classroom environments. Through this inquiry cycle, we were reminded of the critical role teachers play in addressing the social and emotional needs of their students, and seamlessly integrating those needs with academic goals. We chose to make our remote instruction platforms work for the individual needs of students rather than use a standardized curriculum enacted on an online platform (McQuirter, 2020). Our students responded, as evidenced in this essay, …

Addressing Student Isolation During The Pandemic: An Inquiry Into Renewing Relationships And Reimagining Classroom Communities On Remote Instruction Platforms, Elizabeth Davis, Angela Flavin, Melanie M. Harris, Laura Huffman, Dicy Watson, Kristin M. Weller

Journal of Practitioner Research

We began this pandemic cycle of inquiry by acknowledging that we all viewed relationships with our students as foundational to the teaching and learning process (i.e., Elmore, 2004; Fullan, 2007; Noddings, 2014; Rimm-Kaufman, et al., 2014). While we had well-established strategies for creating caring classroom communities in our face-to-face classrooms prior to the pandemic, we were all searching for new online strategies for keeping relationships vital when faced with the abrupt transition to remote instruction and the isolating effects of the Spring 2020 lockdown, both for ourselves and for our students. Hence, we committed to documenting and sharing with one …

Introduction To The Special Issue: Inquiring Into, About, And During Covid-19, Nancy Fichtman Dana, Karen L. Kilgore

Journal of Practitioner Research

One of the most pervasive ways the inquiry movement has needed to be reshaped since its inception is as a mechanism to respond to a global pandemic. As COVID-19 necessitated an abrupt transition to remote delivery of instruction, teachers needed a powerful form of professional learning to understand and respond with changes to serve their students during this challenging time. At P. K. Yonge Developmental Research School, a K-12 school, the leadership team designed a Canvas website devoted to teacher inquiry, enabling teachers to share experiences, collaborate, and address issues regarding the abrupt transition to emergency remote instruction. In this …

Do I Belong? What Students Teach Us About Belonging To A New University, Jennifer Ann Scaia

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Foundational to this evaluation study, the participating institution aspired to improve its retention rate. Students’ perceived sense of belonging has been identified as an important variable related to student retention and persistence (Bean & Eaton, 2000; Strayhorn 2012; Strayhorn 2019; Tinto, 2017). For students to succeed beyond their first year in college, it is fundamentally important that they view themselves as valued members of the university community (Bean & Eaton, 2000; Bollen & Hoyle, 1990; Murphy, 2016).

The purpose of this study was to evaluate how undergraduate students, predicted as less likely to retain into their second year, described their …

Using Covid-19 Vaccine Efficacy Data To Teach One-Sample Hypothesis Testing, Frank Wang

Numeracy

In late November 2020, there was a flurry of media coverage of two companies’ claims of 95% efficacy rates of newly developed COVID-19 vaccines, but information about the confidence interval was not reported. This paper presents a way of teaching the concept of hypothesis testing and the construction of confidence intervals using numbers announced by the drug makers Pfizer and Moderna publicized by the media. Instead of a two-sample test or more complicated statistical models, we use the elementary one-proportion z-test to analyze the data. The method is designed to be accessible for students who have only taken a …

Using The Cipp Evaluation Model To Examine A Bachelor Of Science In Health Systems Management Program, Somer Goad Burke

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of this formative evaluation was to explore the effectiveness of a Bachelor of Science in Health Systems Management (BS HSMT) program in supporting student success through gathering information that led to recommendations for program improvement. The evaluation setting was a public university in the southeastern United States that began enrolling students in the BS HSMT in the fall semester 2017. The BS HSMT was developed to meet the local workforce need for professionals trained in health management and to offer a non-clinical bachelor’s degree for students not competitive or not admitted to their first-choice selective major (described in …