Professional learning communities (PLCs) are being recognized as effective in improving teacher collaboration and student achievement. Trust is critical in effectively implementing the PLC model, and the school principal is best positioned to influence school trust levels. Using five facets of trust, this research sought to clarify the impact of…

Presents discussion of basic components and characteristics of contingency contracts. Includes case study in which contingency contracting procedures were integrated within a behavioral consultation model used by a school psychologist consulting with a classroom teacher to modify personal hygiene of 12-year-old male. (Author/ABL)

Presents a case study of a sixth grade teacher trying to increase her use of literature for language arts instruction. Shows the challenges and successes of attempting to get better at teaching. (PRA)

Discusses problems experienced during the prewriting phase of a sixth grade writing lesson, observations of the lesson, and advice from leading educators on how to initiate an effective writing lesson. Presents an account of one writing lesson that typifies writing lessons that the author has observed during the evaluation of student teachers. (SG)

Investigates changing teacher roles associated with two teachers' use of innovative mathematics materials at the sixth-grade level, in a setting that contained all the ideal ingredients for professional growth. Concludes that the greatest changes in the teachers' roles related to increasing comfort with posing non-routine problems to students and…

A year-long naturalistic case study investigated teacher-initiated change efforts in language arts by examining the experiences and influences of a single sixth-grade teacher. The teacher was observed in multiple contexts (both in and out of her school), interacting with varying groups of individuals, not all of which were located within the…

Efferent teaching asks the student to read for a predetermined answer, focusing on another person's ideas of the text's meaning. Aesthetic teaching allows for literature to be read and experienced as art through the reader's personal transaction with the text which focuses on one's own interest to create and understand the meaning. This paper…

Offers an interpretive case study designed to provide insights about students' thoughts, feelings, and actions when not initially motivated for literacy tasks, and ways in which some students were able to become intrinsically interested. Reveals three different patterns of engagement (or lack thereof), represented in three different "Situations"…

Presents an exploratory investigation of six case study subjects (bilingual 4th and 6th grade students, speakers of Spanish and Nahuatl from Central Mexico) that seeks to develop a typology of one aspect of text processing by second language readers that would be difficult to assess by other evaluation approaches that do not require oral reading:…

Describes how in the examination of a sixth-grade girl's participation in the language arts classroom that is driven by high-stakes testing and by a regimented classroom culture, the authors came to view students' approaches to literacy events as "stances" and their negotiation of their subjectivities in response to literacy events as…

A study examined how students use their prior knowledge and experience to help them understand a text, and how that influences what they recall from the text. Subjects, 46 sixth graders from 3 elementary schools in Nashville, Tennessee, were tape recorded as they thought aloud while reading either a passage on "sugar" or a passage on…

A study investigated the nature of a sixth-grade community of readers from the emic perspective (participants' point of view). A qualitative interpretive case study was conducted in one sixth-grade language arts classroom with the researcher acting as participant-observer. Data in the form of fieldnotes, interviews, and written samples of…

Describes how one teacher worked with a learning-disabled sixth grader, who benefited from the opportunity to write about what he knew and cared about. (SR)

A study investigaged: (1) in what ways sixth-grade students appropriated language and/or themes from multicultural poetry into their own poetry writing and (2) when students appropriated language and/or themes, what factors influenced their choices. Subjects were 5 students within a class of 22, chosen for case studies because of their unique…

A case study explored issues related to the self-selection of literature in a literature-based reading program. Lori, the student whose selection behaviors are highlighted, was one of 14 students who participated in a 5-month qualitative study in a sixth-grade classroom where the students were able to self-select their reading material. Lori, a…