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During the months leading up to and immediately following President Donald Trump’s election, the unique intersection of classroom academic freedom and teacher and students’ first amendment rights would be duly tested, as headlines reminded citizens, parents, and pundits that the reach of raw emotions and political viewpoints did not stop at the schoolhouse door. School and classroom-based events would eventually test the norms of community, the interpretation of legal precedents, the resolve of district and school leadership, and the rights or limits thereof of the teachers themselves. This analysis is grounded on case studies of eight such incidents, all of which occurred at the high school level in public school districts. These eight cases are analyzed in terms of the incidents, the teacher’s actions or speech, the consequences, the relevant legal precedents surrounding academic freedom, the parental, student, and community reaction, and the short- and long-term impacts moving forward.

Thirty-two qualitative research reports on co-teaching in inclusive classrooms, identified through a comprehensive literature search, are reviewed. Studies have included significant diversity in grade level, geographical location, setting, and took place in three different countries. Overall, teachers and administrators reported a high degree of satisfaction with co-teaching. However, a number of needs were also addressed, including administrative support, appropriate caseloads, planning time, student skill level, and co-teacher compatibility. Implications for research and practice are discussed.

Goal orientations and classroom goal structures proved to be highly predictive of classroom-related behaviors and academic achievement. The purpose of the present study was to predict students’ classroom behaviors from goal orientations and classroom goal structures and compare those predictions across students with and without learning problems. Participants were 209 typical students and 18 students with learning difficulties/disabilities (LD). Individual goal orientations and perceptions of classrooms’ goal structures were assessed using self-reports. Student behaviors were assessed over five consecutive days during school hours. Using Multilevel Random Coefficient Modeling (MRCM) procedures, results indicated that mastery approach goals and a mastery goal structure were positive predictors of positive affect, student engagement and students’ perceptions of reinforcement from teachers. Mastery avoidance goals were a negative predictor of positive affective states and a positive predictor of both negative affective states and perceptions of punishment. Last, performance approach goals and a performance goal structure exerted deleterious effects on students’ positive classroom behaviors, particularly for students with LD. When matching mastery goals with a mastery goal structure, effects were significantly more pronounced, and in the desired direction, compared to the matching of performance goals with a performance goal structure. Implications of the findings for practice are discussed.

Over nearly two decades the Supporting Effective Teaching project examined the characteristics of teachers that result in successful inclusion of students with disabilities in Canadian regular education classrooms. These studies revealed that teachers who rate high in adapting and calibrating instruction for students who have special needs are the most successful overall with all their students. In this chapter, we present an adaptation of the observation scale that we used to rate effective inclusive instructional practices. The adapted scale can be used both as a self-rating and as a third-party measurement scale of effective teaching practices. We link each element of the scale to the Universal Design for Learning framework. We discuss how challenges to effective practices are affected by teacher beliefs about ability and disability, collegial differences in beliefs and practices, and the focus set by the leadership in the school.

When bilingual teachers are first hired, many say they are pressured to teach material only in English (Menken, 2008). Removing instruction in a child’s native language is not likely to improve scores on English standardized tests (Rolstad, Mahoney, & Glass, 2005), and long term, English-Only instruction reduces academic success and reduces graduation rates (Iddings, Combs, & Moll, 2012). This chapter looks at bilingual classrooms in a Texas school district, through classroom observations, interviews, and a large-scale survey seeking to answer the question, what do officially bilingual classrooms look like when they operate monolingually? Results showed that administrators exerted pressure, and teachers used methods they expected not to work. Some bilingual classrooms had teachers who either could not speak Spanish, or chose not to. Because classrooms operated without the legally required amount of first-language instruction, the district’s “bilingual” programs undermined accountability data while harming emergent bilinguals. Teacher educators have not prepared bilingual teachers for the reality of anti-bilingual schools. New teachers need to know how to not only implement research-based instruction but also defend their instructional choices. Wherever lawmakers, agencies, and administrators have allowed transitional bilingual programs to become de facto monolingual, there may be a role for colleges of education to play, monitoring, assisting, and, if necessary, publicizing lack of compliance. Study findings are limited to one specific district; even in districts with similar phenomena, the manner in which a bilingual program ceases to be bilingual will vary substantially.

To describe the role one classroom writing community played in shaping students’ understandings of the analytical writing genre; and to discuss the impact the community had on students’ developing academic writing identities.

While research has demonstrated the impact of classroom writing communities on student writing practices and identities at the elementary level (Dyson, 1997) and for secondary students engaged in fiction writing (Halverson, 2005), less is known about the role classroom writing communities may play for secondary students who are learning to write in academic discourses. This chapter explores the practices of one such classroom community and discusses the ways the community facilitated students’ introduction to the discourse of analytical writing.

The teacher turned the classroom writing community into an authentic audience, and in so doing, he developed students’ understandings of the analytical writing genre and their growing identities as academic writers. First, he used the concept of immediate audience (i.e., writing to persuade real readers) as the primary rationale for students to follow the outlined expectations for analytical writing. Second, he used inquiry discussions around student work (i.e., interacting with other members of the writing community) to prepare students for a future audience of prospective independent school English classrooms.

By turning the classroom writing community into an authentic audience through inquiry discussions, teachers can develop students’ deep and flexible understandings of a potentially unfamiliar writing genre. Furthermore, by employing the classroom writing community as a support for moving students through moments of struggle, teachers implicate students’ expertise as academic writers, thereby facilitating their willingness to take on academic writing identities.

Teachers play a vital role in the structure of their classrooms. Part of this structure is having a clear understanding of the importance of not only supporting their students, but also the teacher assistants/support staff with whom they collaborate. Providing teacher assistants/support staff with guidance, information on student needs and classroom structures, team-building strategies, training, and supervision sets the stage for a positive climate for collaboration, teamwork, and learning. Consequently, teachers should be proactive and diligent to ensure high-quality training and supervision for teacher assistants/support staff, as this will have a direct impact on the services and learning opportunities being provided to the students.

The transition from a traditional lecture style method of teaching to the flipped classroom in sophomore-level Organic Chemistry I and II courses at an Historically Black University (HBCU) is described. The process of implementation was explained and the students’ performance was analyzed. The flipped teaching method made a much bigger positive impact to Organic I than Organic II Chemistry course. A higher percentage of A, B or better, and C or better were observed for Organic I Chemistry course. The DFW rate was also significantly lower for the Organic I Chemistry flipped classroom. However, Organic II results were very similar between the students from both teaching methods.

Physical victimization at school is little studied in impoverished developing country contexts. Moreover, the role of school and classroom contexts as risk factors remains poorly understood.

The aim of the study is to investigate the prevalence of physical victimization in rural Chinese middle schools as well as the individual, teacher/classroom, and school-level risk factors associated with experiencing physical victimization.

We use two waves of longitudinal, representative survey data to perform a multilevel logistic regression analysis (MLRA) of physical victimization among middle school students from 100 villages in one of China’s poorest provinces. We focus on a subset of questionnaire items that were gathered from students when the sampled children were 13–16 years old. We also utilize student data from the first wave of the survey to control for prior internalizing problems and academic achievement. Finally, we link matched data collected from principal and teacher questionnaires to examine the risk factors for physical victimization associated with students’ microclimates and the wider school environment.

A substantial proportion of middle school students (40%) reported having been beaten by classmates. Elevated risk was found among males; students with prior poor performance in language; students with past internalizing problems; students of female teachers and teachers evaluated as low performing; students in disruptive classrooms; and students in classrooms undergoing mandated reforms.

These findings suggest that efforts to reduce school violence should not only focus on the deficits of individual students, but rather should target practices to alter the within school risk factors associated with microclimates.