I examine the student-achievement implications of school-level budgetary autonomy in public schools. I propose a theoretical model of a principal's allocation decisions and empirically examine determinants of participation and the resulting impacts on student achievement. A principal's years of administrative experience positively impact program…

Recent studies highlight the outcomes of COVID-19 on the psychosocial skills of early adolescents. It shows the unavailability of virtual community mentoring models for teenagers' individual and interpersonal growth in the virtual scenario. Hence, there emerges a need to explore and apply the available virtual communication resources by…

The purpose of this scoping review is to critically examine previous research that connects three selected model-based practices (MBPs) to social and emotional learning (SEL) outcomes in K-12 physical education (PE) settings to inform a future research agenda for the field. A methodological framework involving the processes of inductive analysis…

Multi-tiered systems of support (MTSS) is the overarching referent for frameworks designed to target behavioral and academic challenges with a focus on a tiered continuum of evidence-based practices within the context of prevention science and implementation research (Freeman, Sugai, Simonsen, & Everett, 2017). Extensive literature indicates…

Since 2007, escape rooms have become increasingly popular in mainstream society. The heightened sense of urgency felt when participating in escape games, united with the possibility of engaging students both in academic and soft-skills has led teachers to add escape games to the list of game-based strategies increasingly used in classrooms.…

Building from the concept 'sponsors of literacy', the authors revisit three empirical studies to argue for mobilising notions of sponsorship beyond fixed conceptions of individual sponsors and literacy to lifewide perspectives that take into account sponsoring relations across the broader learning lives of youth. The authors take up the…

The dramaturgical method has been used to analyse teaching and didactic contexts, but the method is not adequately described or established in such contexts. In this article we use dramaturgy as a lens for describing and analysing teaching. The teaching examples are taken from a professional workshop where student teachers and their instructors…

The purpose of this article is to address how important a teacher's enthusiasm and the words they use can be. This is funneled through future professionals' teaching experiences, both peer to peer in the college classroom and teaching experiences in a middle school class.

This six-day research project examined the potential for how trade books and primary sources can be used in concert with each other to develop middle school students' disciplinary thinking skills in the manners advocated for in the C3 Framework. The project was focused on the trade book "Thurgood," a picture book biography about Supreme…

Much has been written about the importance of developing students' civic online reasoning--their ability to effectively search for and evaluate social and political information on the internet. Studies show that students are easily duped by a website's top-level domain name, professional appearance, or About page content, and that they neglect to…

In this article, the authors examine one approach to teaching hard history using an Inquiry Design Model (IDM) curricular loop. A curricular loop allows students to build a deeper understanding of a complex idea and develop a greater facility with the tools of inquiry over a course of study by regularly engaging in an inquiry. The curricular loop…

Middle school brings rapid developmental changes for adolescents, and parent engagement is as essential as ever. However, what worked for parent-teacher partnerships in elementary school doesn't fit so well in middle school. Adolescents are building their autonomy, and teachers must help empower parents' efforts to bolster students as independent…

School systems started the 2021-22 school year with extra resources and plans for recovery, but repeated resurgences of the COVID-19 virus thwarted hopes of a strong comeback. Schools continued to face a myriad of challenges including severe staff shortages, high rates of absenteeism and sickness, and rolling school closures forced by the…

In this article, I consider what Noddings' ideas about the critical lessons schools should teach might suggest for social education and critical thinking at the middle school level. Giving particular consideration to Noddings' calls to engage young people in self-understanding and allow students to pursue their interests, this article explores how…

This study examines the influence of the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) 1999 results on mathematics education policy in Israel. Analyzing various documents, the study shows how these results transformed policymakers' discourse regarding mathematics education. In order to achieve improvement in Israel's ranking, the…