Teachers' perceptions of long-term career success are largely related to the levels of support they receive early on in their careers. This study on teacher retention and the factors that influence teacher choice to remain in the field after the first five years of employment, examined three schools of varying demographics and socioeconomic status…

As part of the Foundations for Success in STEM project at Florida State University, more than thirty teams of teachers have used the Formative Assessment Collaborative Team (FACT) meeting model to work together toward better understanding of their students' mathematical thinking and its implications for instruction. This article provides a brief…

In this article, we describe how our general and special education faculty collaborated to infuse the Universal Design for Learning framework into our special education preparation program, a dual-licensure special education and elementary education (K-6) undergraduate degree program. We describe the curriculum reform processes and outcomes of the…

Historically, students with partial or complete deafness (PCD) were placed in residential schools and remained there until they graduated high school. Today, inclusion has changed this; students are placed in traditional schools within inclusive classrooms. There are more students with PCD in inclusion classrooms today than ever before. Therefore,…

Multi-age classrooms feature the intentional grouping of students from consecutive grade levels for the purpose of fostering a nurturing classroom atmosphere. While an abundance of research on multi-age education has been produced throughout the past 50 years, only recent efforts have seen researchers turn their attention to the experiences of art…

Least restrictive environment (LRE) is defined as teaching children with disabilities alongside non-disabled children; these children have not been identified as students with disabilities. An inclusion setting is the integration of students with disabilities in the general education setting to provide the least restrictive environment. Inclusion…

Student peer effects are well documented. We know far less, however, about peer effects among teachers. We hypothesize that a relatively effective teacher may positively affect the performance of their peers, while a relatively ineffective teacher may negatively impact the performance of other teachers with whom they work closely. Utilizing a…

As director of the National Writing Project (NWP) at Florida Gulf Coast University, one of the first questions the author gets from both elementary and high school teachers when she talks about the NWP Summer Invitational Institute is this: "What can we possibly hope to gain from each other as we share our best practices?" High school…

This study investigated how teachers described current decision making structures, culture, and the power/micropolitics of their work, examining how they used their agency to accomplish work and make decisions together under Florida's reform. Data came from interviews with 1996 and 1997 elementary educators selected as teachers of the year. The…