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This paper aims to examine how two White teachers, experienced and award-winning veteran educators, navigated issues of race, class and privilege in their instruction, and ways that their efforts and shortcomings shaped both teacher agency and classroom spaces.

This study’s methodology centers participants’ experiences and understandings over the course of two years of interviews, classroom observations and discussion groups. The study is conceptually informed by Sara Ahmed’s argument that social justice is often approached as something that education “can do,” which is problematic because it assumes that successful enactment is “intrinsic to the term.” Discussing and/or intending social justice replaces real change, and those leading the conversations believe that they have made meaningful differences. Instead, true shifts in thinking and action are “dependent on forms of institutional commitment […and] how it [diversity/social justice] gets taken up” (p. 241).

Using an in vivo coding approach – i.e. using direct quotations of participants’ words to name the new codes – the authors organized their findings into two discussions: “Damn – Every Time I’m with the Kids, I Just End Up Feeling Frozen”; and “Maybe I’m Just Not Giving These Kids a Fair Shake – Maybe I’m the Problem”.

The participants centered a participatory examination of intersectionality, rather than the previous teacher-mandated one. They “put into action” -xplorations of intersectionality that were predicated on students’ identities and experiences, thus making intersectionality a lived concept, rather than an intellectual one, and transforming students’ and their own engagement.

In the Fall of 2020, three teacher educators in Ohio collaborated on a three-month long online professional development series on how to write Focused Inquiries, a la the Inquiry Design Model (IDM).

The authors detail the contents of the six group professional development (PD) sessions and share the lessons that the authors learned as a result of leading this training.

Given this study’s mixed results, the authors often came back to the questions of “maybe it was us? Maybe it was the pandemic? Maybe there wasn’t enough training? Or maybe IDM creation isn’t a skill that all teachers possess and maybe that’s ok?” The authors share the struggles with these questions and situate all of this within the current culture wars raging around schools today.

Finally, the authors offer the current approach to inquiry training for teachers that situates inquiry creation later in the process after significant structured introductory work.

Recent years have seen a movement toward using active learning to ground professional development in classroom practice. The paper aims to discuss this issue.

The present case study describes how a group of middle school mathematics teachers improved classroom instruction through the use of lesson study.

This case study suggests the success of the lesson study in supporting teachers’ active learning.

For the lesson study, teachers’ active learning is assessed across four dimensions.

Despite the ever-increasing importance of cultivating information, communication and technology literacy skills among college students, they have yet to be related to comprehensive measuring instruments. A glance at the empirical literature reveals that most pertinent scales have been confined to measuring Internet literacy skills, whereas educators in the 21st century advocate an inclusive conceptualization of ICT literacy. Such a comprehensive conceptualization embodies technical, critical, cognitive and emotional competencies. Additionally, more empirical evidence is needed to indicate gaps in testing measurement invariance of ICT literacy scales across genders or cultures. To that end, the current study aims to adapt and cross-validate an ICT literacy self-efficacy scale across gender by testing the measurement invariance using a multiple-sampling confirmatory factor analysis (MCFA). Furthermore, the current study aims to verify the ICT literacy self-efficacy scale's psychometric properties to establish its construct validity and understand the scale's underlying factorial structure.

The current study has administered the scale to a cross-sectional sample of 3560 undergraduate students enrolled in six universities in the Sultanate of Oman.

The results have revealed that the ICT literacy self-efficacy exhibits satisfactory indices of construct validity. On the other hand, the results of MCFA demonstrate that the differences in the goodness of fit indices between the nested models and the baseline model were below the cut-off criterion of 0.01, indicating invariance. Therefore, the scale has proved to be amenable for comparing genders on their ICT literacy self-efficacy using an one-way multivariate analysis of variance.

The study has several implications for research and pedagogical practices. The study provides empirical evidence for establishing ICT literacy self-efficacy as a distinct high-domain construct of task-specific self-efficacy beliefs.

This paper aims to report on the decisions two teachers made about how to engage with a five-year school–university collaboration that used professional development (PD) to foster changes in language instruction for teachers of multilingual learners.

A longitudinal case study was used to examine the experiences of two teachers to provide insights into classroom-level decisions and changes in instructional practices.

Changes in instructional practices occurred when teachers made active, engaged choices about their own learning and teaching in the classroom. Teacher learning did not follow a consistent trajectory of improvement and contained contradictions, and early decisions about how to engage with PD affected the pace and nature of teacher learning. Through personal decisions about how to engage with PD, teachers adopted new instructional practices to support multilingual learners. Positive changes required extended time for teachers to implement new practices successfully.

This collaboration points to a need for long-term PD partnerships that value teacher agency to produce instructional changes that support multilingual learners.

PD can play a key role in transforming literacy instruction for multilingual learners. Teacher agency, including the decisions teachers make about how to engage with professional learning opportunities and how to enact new instructional practices in the classroom, mediates the efficacy of PD initiatives. This longitudinal case study contributes to the understanding of effective PD by presenting two contrasting case studies of teacher agency and learning during long-term school–university collaboration.

Our ongoing program of research works with teachers to help them become more autonomy supportive during instruction and hence more able to promote students’ classroom motivation and engagement.

We have published five experimentally based, longitudinally designed, teacher-focused intervention studies that have tested the effectiveness and educational benefits of an autonomy-supportive intervention program (ASIP).

Findings show that (1) teachers can learn how to become more autonomy supportive and less controlling toward students, (2) students of the teachers who participate in ASIP report greater psychological need satisfaction and lesser need frustration, (3) these same students report and behaviorally display a wide range of important educational benefits, such as greater classroom engagement, (4) teachers benefit as much from giving autonomy support as their students do from receiving it as teachers show large postintervention gains in outcomes such as teaching efficacy and job satisfaction, and (5) these ASIP-induced benefits are long lasting as teachers use the ASIP experience as a professional developmental opportunity to upgrade the quality of their motivating style.

Our ASIP helps teachers learn how to better support their students’ autonomy during instruction. The value of this teaching skill can be seen in teachers’ and students’ enhanced classroom experience and functioning.

The purpose of this paper is to examine how US school leaders make sense of external mandates, and the way in which their understanding of state and district accountability policies affects their work. It is posited that school leaders’ responses to external accountability are likely to reflect a complex interaction between their perception of the accountability policies, the state and district contexts in which those policies are situated and their own leadership beliefs and practices.

The authors use both principal and teacher survey data to explore the question of how perceptions of external policy are associated with instructional leadership behaviors. Cases of seven principals are employed to flesh out the findings from the survey analysis.

It is concluded that external accountability policy may have a positive impact on instructional leadership – where they see those policies as aligned with their own values and preferences, and where they see their district leaders as supportive of school‐driven accountability initiatives. In these cases, school leaders internalize the external accountability policies and shape them to the particular needs that they see as priorities in their own school. Where one or the other of these factors is weak or missing, on the other hand, leaders demonstrate more negative attitudes to external accountability and weaker instructional leadership.

This analysis draws on a unique, large‐scale data base and uses a mixed methods approach to answer the question.

We describe the development and various implementations of a reading comprehension instruction program called Concept-Oriented Reading Instruction (CORI). CORI was designed to enhance students’ reading motivation and reading comprehension, and has been implemented at both elementary and middle school, with a particular focus on science information text reading.

We overview Guthrie and Wigfield’s (2000) reading engagement model, which provides CORI’s theoretical framework. Then we present the major implementation of CORI at elementary school and middle school.

CORI teachers in elementary school focused on five teaching practices to foster motivation: (1) providing thematic content goals; (2) optimizing choice; (3) hands-on activities connected to reading; (4) providing interesting texts; and (5) fostering collaboration. Teachers also taught six reading strategies recommended by the National Reading Panel. Results of several studies showed that CORI students had higher reading motivation and better reading comprehension than students receiving only strategy instruction or traditional reading instruction. We next describe three implementations of CORI at middle school. The motivational instructional practices at this level included (1) thematic contact goals; (2) emphasizing the importance of reading; (3) showing how reading is relevant to student lives; (4) fostering collaboration; (5) optimizing choice; and (6) enabling success. Results of several studies again documented CORI’s success at boosting students’ motivation and comprehension.

The studies carried out show the success of CORI and the paper closes with suggestions about the next steps for the program.

As school districts continue to devalue social studies through a narrowed focus on English language arts (ELA) and mathematics, this study investigated elements of curricular control in a district lacking a formal, purchased curricular program in the elementary grades. Without prescribed and scripted lessons, it was hypothesized that teacher autonomy would allow greater opportunities to investigate social studies concepts and skills.

Without prescribed and scripted lessons, it was hypothesized that teacher autonomy would allow greater opportunities to investigate social studies concepts and skills. Bernstein's theory of pedagogic discourse guided this study's analysis of power and control. This manuscript describes a micro-level discourse analysis that applies Gee's tools on interview data from two teachers.

Findings demonstrate some opportunities for teacher autonomy, but hierarchical control from administration persists and influences teacher decision-making. As researchers continue to argue for the increased presence of elementary social studies, this study demonstrates that the lack of a formal scripted curricular program presents opportunities for teachers, but administrative control endures and hinders teacher autonomy and instructional decision-making.

The data size and number of participants in this study may present limitations that impact generalizability. However, the focus for this study was to gain a deeper understanding of the messaging from two teachers. Comparability and translatability were identified as factors for research design to establish legitimacy (LeCompte and Preissle, 1993).

When considering implications from this study, two elements are considered. First, the continued devaluation of social studies persists, despite the implementation of Common Core standards. As a result, other measures must be investigated and implemented to ensure the subject is elevated to a more prominent position representative of its importance to a democracy. To accomplish this goal, teacher input and autonomy must also be respected to ensure a quality curriculum is utilized in the classroom. While teachers may exert control, albeit limited, in their instructional decision-making, many others are reliant on purchased programs that do not allow even this narrow classroom influence.

In this study, teachers' language use demonstrated external administrative control as well as autonomous decision-making. Their assigned schedule privileged ELA and math through the allocation of time. Moreover, administrators stated that social studies is not a priority, a sentiment counter to participants' values. Therefore, while they recognized the inherent benefit of the subject to their students, hierarchical power controlled the classification and framing of instruction. A weakened classification and framing structure must be sought to allow more opportunities for purposeful integration of content through messaging systems that are more responsive to students' needs.

The purpose of this paper is to explore a framework for considering moral K‐12 instructional technology. It seeks to examine the extent that development of technology policies consider and respect affected parties' interests.

Interpreting morality as an economic concept that involves a reconciliation of societal members' diverse needs and wants, the authors describe moral instruction technology use as a negotiation of administrative, teaching and learning needs along five continua defined by Mason, in 1986 and Peace and Hartzel in 2002: property, freedom of speech, privacy, accessibility, and accountability. The paper commences with observations concerning research into technology‐based empowerment and associated ethical issues. It then describes the five continua of ethical instructional technology challenges within the contexts of K‐12 settings.

The authors encourage research through observational and survey studies to clarify understandings of these continua. Although presented separately, they acknowledge that these dimensions overlap and interact to comprise a mesh of moral dilemmas. If morality represents a concept designed to balance societal powers, then implementation of moral instructional technology processes respects the views of all educators. The authors argue that how educators interpret technology's placements along these moral continua have important consequences for practice. They encourage research that interprets these relationships and how they may best support classroom processes.

The paper presents an exploratory framework, offering insights into ethical issues in instructional technology.