This article reports on urban elementary teachers' understandings of cultural relevancy and the practices they enacted after a professional development on culturally relevant education (CRE) and cognitive apprenticeship. Focus group interviews support that participating teachers understood some principles of CRE but did not always match the theory…

Previous work on new teacher professional identity has focused on identity as a process of negotiation between individual and contextual factors. These negotiations are often filled with a struggle between personal agency and structures that prevent the enactment of an ideal professional self. This study introduces and discusses three teacher…

Research commonly finds that urban teachers bring deficit views about students of color with them into classrooms, and professional development efforts focused on this critical problem have been met with limited success. Therefore, scholars have called for work that integrates content and equity as a way to challenge teachers' deficit views at the…

Few studies have investigated school connectedness from the perspectives of the adults working in the school. Using qualitative methods, the present study examined three dimensions of school connectedness in one urban, low-income middle school. Analyses revealed that school personnel cared for students' needs, sometimes at the expense of holding…

Some researchers believe that collaboration between schools and community stakeholders--including families, educators, community organizations, and businesses--is the key to improving public education. However, broad and inclusive community-school partnerships are rare. Instead, we frequently hear about friction between communities and their…

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to determine if faculty development, as measured by progression through the Stages of Concern, identified in the Concerns-Based Adoption Model, occurred as a result of teaching in a learning community (LC) cohort at a California community college, and if progression through developmental Stages of Concern is…

Using a social justice orientation to teacher education and a sociocultural approach to learning, this exploratory study presents data from twenty pre-service urban teachers about their perceptions of and visions for teaching in urban schools. Findings reveal candidates' desires to care for and build relationships with urban youth as a foundation…

A study investigated how schools and teachers attempt to meet the needs of language minority students and to utilize literature as a means to teach English language reading to students while building their English language capacities. Language arts and reading instruction was observed in 12 third- through fifth-grade classrooms in three elementary…

The contents of this document are organized in five parts, as follows, Part I, a "Preface" entitled "The Dilemma," by Florence May, discusses the anxiety felt by teachers who are, for the first time, trying to teach people about whose culture and background they know little or nothing, and how educational change could deal with…

A group of three conference papers, all addressing effective instructional programs, is presented in this document. The first paper, entitled "The Organization--A Viable Instrument for Progress" (Barbara Sizemore), addresses the subject of high-achieving, predominantly black elementary schools. Routines in these schools not present in…