The purpose of this Action Research study was to investigate professional development, specifically related to technology, which has not provided teachers with adequate 21st century learning opportunities. This study sought to investigate a possible solution to ineffective professional development. Participants and data collected in Cycle 1…

A common approach to scaling up a professional development program is for the researchers who designed the program to prepare teacher leaders to facilitate it at their schools. When researchers eventually leave, however, teacher leaders may receive less support. To ensure that teacher leaders continue receiving support, researchers can prepare…

Purpose: The purpose of this study is to explore how, through the cultivation of reform ownership in the professional development (PD) program, the Pathway Project, agency was achieved for the development of teacher professionalism and teacher expertise in the cases of Mrs. Cruz and Mrs. Keyes. This, in turn, provided opportunities to advance…

Research-practice partnerships play an important role in critically examining racial disparities in schools, as well as supporting the immediate adoption of practice improvement. This article outlines the results of a multisite case study with students, teachers, and administrators across two racially and ethnically diverse middle schools in the…

Living Book--Augmenting Reading for Life, a three-year EU-funded Erasmus + project (September 2016-August 2019), exploited the affordances of augmented reality (AR) and other emerging technologies in order to address the underachievement of European youth in reading skills. The program developed an innovative approach that empowers teachers from…

This dissertation focuses on teacher and staff perceptions of Multi-Tiered Systems of Support (MTSS) implementation at the middle school level. MTSS implementation at the secondary level proves to be a daunting task which includes many complex facets. Ensuring that teacher and staff insights are sought out and taken into account when implementing…

Hierarchical linear modeling (HLM) has become an increasingly popular multilevel method of analyzing data among nested datasets, in particular, the effect of specialized academic programming within schools. The purpose of this methodological study is to demonstrate the use of HLM to determine the effectiveness of STEM programming in an Ohio middle…

In a local middle school, students were not meeting standards on the state mathematics tests. The purpose of this qualitative study was to explore mathematics teachers' perspectives on effective mathematics instruction vis-a-vis the principles of the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics (NCTM). Within this framework, the 6 principles in the…

Exemplary middle schools have a variety of programs that support students' needs and help them adjust socially and emotionally; advisory programs can be one structure to effectively provide some of this support. This article shares the story of how a group of middle level teachers and teacher leaders within a culturally diverse school reclaimed…

When beginning music teachers enter a new classroom for the first time, they start a journey toward understanding a new context and community. Place consciousness develops as they become embedded in their community and begin to recognize how its culture and environment interact with their teaching practices. By mapping the objects, people, and…

We posit that professional development (PD) models fall on a continuum from highly adaptive to highly specified, and that these constructs provide a productive way to characterize and distinguish among models. The study reported here examines the impact of an adaptive mathematics PD model on teachers' knowledge and instructional practices as well…

In British Columbia (BC), Canada, a school district effort was launched to focus on mental wellbeing in middle and senior secondary schools. The initiative "Got Health?" was intended to help students take the lead, through action research, in program development and delivery of information. The purpose of this action research project was…

Current policy efforts that seek to improve learning in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) emphasize the importance of helping all students acquire concepts and tools from computer science that help them analyze and develop solutions to everyday problems. These goals have been generally described in the literature under the…

This study examines how high-quality professional development can promote the diffusion of effective teaching strategies among teachers through collaboration. Drawing on longitudinal and sociometric data from a study of writing professional development in 39 schools, this study shows that teachers' participation in professional development is…

This Teaching and Learning Research Initiative (TLRI) project was a 2-year exploratory study focusing on differentiating the curriculum in response to individual learner differences. The project was designed to explore learning and teaching of differentiated scientific content through observational processes and the expression of that learning…