Within the specific context of Saudi Arabian high schools, I conducted a qualitative study to gain a greater understanding of how decentralization, a significant reform initiative, affected principals and teachers. The study centered around participants' perspectives, challenges, and successes. I actively sought recommendations for improving the…

Historically, the role of district central offices has been to efficiently execute policy and compliance demands around enrollment, funding, licensure, facilities, and academic standards with little attention to the processes and learning that is needed to promote high-quality instruction. This capstone examines the implications of organizing…

Many countries around the world are implementing changes to their systems of teacher education in an effort to improve the way teachers teach and how much children learn in school. This dissertation uses the case of Ghana to examine how a suite of ambitious reforms--including the upgrading of teacher education to university education, a new…

Schools are remarkably resilient institutions, with the core of instruction and the dynamics between teachers, students, and school leaders remaining largely unchanged despite a churn of reforms efforts. To move away from "tinkering" around the edges of the system, reach deeper into classrooms, and mitigate the effects of policy churn,…

Professional development should be linked to fostering best practice and improving student learning (Darling-Hammond, 2009). By providing ongoing opportunities for professional learning that focus on best practice, teachers are more likely to develop the knowledge and skills associated with high-quality teacher instruction and raising student…

In the United States, there have been calls for reform to teacher evaluation practices for over 20 years (Reddy et al., 2016). Extant research primarily investigates administrators' perceptions of teacher evaluation process outcomes and there is limited research on teachers' perceptions of the cycle of supervision within the evaluation process.…

Some higher education institutions in the Americas adopted "The Learning College" principles evinced by the Twelve Vanguard Colleges' report, to upgrade their academic environments from "the sage-on-the stage to teachers as architect of student-centered learning." These twelve institutions in the United States and Canada…

Sino-foreign cooperative education, a cornerstone of China's international higher education collaborations, plays a pioneering role in its higher education reforms. This mode not only offers a bridge to global education markets but also shapes the trajectory of higher educational reform. The research presented here aims to improve the…

The need for quality science education has long been established, but despite reform after reform, it remains a current concern. What we know as good teaching is not happening, perhaps because there is an increase in science teachers using alternative certification programs to enter the field. This lack of formal training causes teachers to have a…

Professional development is essential for teachers to grow in their profession. However, often professional development is a one size fits all approach, and it occurs outside of the teachers' classroom. This causes teachers to not fully implement new strategies when they return to their classroom. One way to overcome this is to utilize…

Despite federal policy and litigation, the continued placement of students with extensive support needs (ESN) in separate classes and schools continues across the United States. Since the enactment of the Education for All Handicapped Children Act (1975), there has been a continuous stream of research regarding the positive effects of including…

Education reform is a contested and complicated terrain where multiple stakeholders with competing visions seek to influence the direction of reform in alignment with their own interests. As a result of these competing visions, education policy is not value free or neutral and favors those who hold the political and economic power to maintain the…

School choice has influenced several educational reforms in the US and across the world in the last decades. These reforms have often promoted school autonomy, parental choice, and competition between schools to improve quality and equity. Whether those reforms work in practice is well examined, but the roles of policy design such as the extent to…

This qualitative, interview-based study examined the experiences of 14 teachers with their professional development. The research was conducted to understand teacher perspective of professional development. Many billions of federal dollars have been spent on teacher professional development, and there has been neither a dramatic increase in…

Teacher occupational burnout has been a long-standing problem for K-12 educators. COVID-19 further exacerbated this dilemma as school districts nationwide tried to solve the crisis and provide quality education to students nationally. The international health scare created an atmosphere of stress, confusion, and emotional and physical trauma…