This study explores the perceptions of teachers regarding the effectiveness of Response to Intervention (RTI[superscript 2]) and Teacher Support Team (TST; also known as Student Support team) frameworks in West Tennessee. The research investigates various facets such as teachers' familiarity with TST and RTI[superscript 2], adequacy of training,…

Over the past several years, states across the nation have seen a decline in the number of classroom teachers remaining in the profession. In November 2022, the Tennessee Department of Education launched work to begin a statewide Tennessee Teacher Retention Listening Tour to engage with Tennessee teachers across the state, hear their lived…

Assessment of student performance is one of the most critical responsibilities of school leaders and teachers. Teachers and school leaders must acquire an understanding of assessment literacy for utilizing data to make sound data-driven decisions. The purpose of this descriptive study was to investigate the levels of assessment literacy among…

Time spent in the outdoors has been proven to benefit individuals of all ages mentally and physically. For example, exposure to nature reduces stress levels, induces relaxation, and provides Vitamin D. Prior research has linked free play outdoors to helping elementary children focus better in the classroom, reducing symptoms of attention deficit…

Like other public workers, teachers typically receive high and compressed ratings that do little to differentiate them based on performance. Motivated by empirical evidence of substantial variation in effectiveness among teachers, there has been a recent push to develop more informative evaluation systems with greater ratings dispersion. We study…

Faculty (N = 154) from approved Tennessee teacher education programs across the range of disciplines responded to an online survey designed to assess the extent to which they practice, teach, and express confidence in co-teaching, collaboration and implementation of universal design for learning (UDL). Faculty strongly endorsed items indicating…

Every student, no matter where he or she lives, deserves a great teacher. States, educator preparation programs (EPPs), and K-12 leaders must work together to ensure that all teachers are learner ready on day one in the classroom. But too often, these actors do not have access to the necessary information to fully prepare teachers for the unique…

The authors surveyed faculty (n = 239) at three diverse institutions to probe perceived motivations for and barriers to involvement in undergraduate research, scholarship, and creative activity (URSCA) across scholarly disciplines. URSCA mentors were significantly more likely than nonparticipants to express proficiency in involving students in…

The primary aim of this study is to use the survey items from the TELL Tennessee Survey (2013) using the Competing Values Framework (CVF) to determine whether teachers' observations about a set of topically organized school climate dimensions and performance levels are associated with teacher satisfaction. Specifically, the study sets out to…

The Common Planning Time Project of the Middle Level Education Research Special Interest Group (MLER SIG) of the American Educational Research Association provided an avenue through which researchers from throughout the United States could investigate numerous aspects of common planning time in schools. Although several studies have investigated…

In this study, the researcher obtained three years of school-level state testing data from 1,467 Title I elementary schools in the state of Tennessee and analyzed the averages in context of teachers' responses on a state-wide TELL survey. The researcher wanted to see if teachers who taught in low-performing schools perceived the absolute and…

Almost half of Tennessee's students are not on grade level in reading and math by the time they complete third grade, and very few of those students achieve proficiency in later grades. To combat this trend and support the skill development and academic achievement of all students, Tennessee has adopted a framework for addressing individual…

We conceptualize students' opportunities to learn remotely during the initial school closures associated with the COVID-19 pandemic. We then examine variation in remote instruction using an original statewide survey of teachers in Tennessee, deployed just a few weeks into the closures. Using three-level logistic regression models, we explore…

This study examines the perceptions of 1,121 teachers in Kentucky and Tennessee to determine their support for the use of mobile phones in the classroom, as well as their perceptions of the mobile phone features that are beneficial for school-related work and the instructional barriers to mobile phone use. The results indicated that slightly more…

The primary aim of this study is to use the survey items from the TELL Tennessee Survey (2013) using the Competing Values Framework (CVF) (Quinn and Rohrbaugh's model of organizational effectiveness) to determine whether teachers' observations about a set of topically organized school climate dimensions and school performance levels are associated…