Download Free Teacher Agency In The Process Of State Mandated Reform Book in PDF and EPUB Free Download. You can read online Teacher Agency In The Process Of State Mandated Reform and write the review.

Under No Child Left Behind (NCLB), federally funded schools and Local Educational Agencies (LEAs) that do not meet Adequate Yearly Progress (A YP) criteria for two consecutive years are designated Program Improvement (PI), mandating participation in school reform interventions. In February 2008, the California Department of Education (CDE) released a corrective action plan mandate requiring all LEAs, or school districts in Year 3 of PI to participate in intensive, moderate, light, or other levels of technical support that includes participation in the District Assistance and Intervention Team (DAIT) process. The DAIT process brings outside consultants and district office administrators into schools and classrooms for regular walkthroughs and assessments of improvement plan implementation. Yet little is known about how these state mandates influence teachers' instructional practices and decision-making power or agency. This study explores teachers' perceptions of the DAIT process and how agency is influenced in an urban fringe pre-kindergarten through grade 8, PI school district in California that volunteered to pilot the DAIT process during the 2006 - 2009 school years. The socio-cultural theory of learning (Gallucci, 2003) and the principal-agent theory (Ferris, 1992) guide the analysis of this embedded and longitudinal multi-case study of three middle schools and the district office within the PI school district. Rich, thick qualitative descriptions from 24 teachers and five district office administrators engaged in state mandated reform emerge from the single-case and cross-case analyses. Teachers perceive the DAIT feedback as vague and lacking in teacher involvement in classroom visitations, which led to teachers viewing the process as superficial. Yet teachers also considered the DAIT process as beneficial in increasing teacher-team reflection and collaboration around a singular, common instructional focus of reading comprehension, which seemed to be positively associated with agency. A variance of teacher agency levels was found to depend upon school context and how teachers perceived themselves while balancing the costs and benefits from DAIT feedback. Findings also reveal that the DAIT process may have compromised teacher agency due to the lack of teacher participation and involvement in the development of the process, potentially eroding teachers' sense of professionalism.
Recent worldwide education policy has reinvented teachers as agents of change and professional developers of the school curriculum. Academic literature has analyzed changes in how teacher professionalism is conceived in policy and in practice but Teacher Agency provides a fresh perspective on this issue, drawing upon an ecological theory of agency. Using this model for understanding agency, Mark Priestley, Gert Biesta and Sarah Robinson explore empirical findings from the 'Teacher Agency and Curriculum Change' project, funded by the UK-based Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC). Drawing together this research with the authors' international experiences and perspectives, Teacher Agency addresses theoretical and practical issues of international significance. The authors illustrate how teacher agency should be understood not only in terms of individual capacity of teachers, but also in respect of the cultures and structures of schooling.
Biology is where many of science's most exciting and relevant advances are taking place. Yet, many students leave school without having learned basic biology principles, and few are excited enough to continue in the sciences. Why is biology education failing? How can reform be accomplished? This book presents information and expert views from curriculum developers, teachers, and others, offering suggestions about major issues in biology education: what should we teach in biology and how should it be taught? How can we measure results? How should teachers be educated and certified? What obstacles are blocking reform?
The prize-winning PBS correspondent's provocative antidote to America's misguided approaches to K-12 school reform During an illustrious four-decade career at NPR and PBS, John Merrow—winner of the George Polk Award, the Peabody Award, and the McGraw Prize—reported from every state in the union, as well as from dozens of countries, on everything from the rise of district-wide cheating scandals and the corporate greed driving an ADD epidemic to teacher-training controversies and America's obsession with standardized testing. Along the way, he taught in a high school, at a historically black college, and at a federal penitentiary. Now, the revered education correspondent of PBS NewsHour distills his best thinking on education into a twelve-step approach to fixing a K–12 system that Merrow describes as being "addicted to reform" but unwilling to address the real issue: American public schools are ill-equipped to prepare young people for the challenges of the twenty-first century. This insightful book looks at how to turn digital natives into digital citizens and why it should be harder to become a teacher but easier to be one. Merrow offers smart, essential chapters—including "Measure What Matters," and "Embrace Teachers"—that reflect his countless hours spent covering classrooms as well as corridors of power. His signature candid style of reportage comes to life as he shares lively anecdotes, schoolyard tales, and memories that are at once instructive and endearing. Addicted to Reform is written with the kind of passionate concern that could come only from a lifetime devoted to the people and places that constitute the foundation of our nation. It is a "big book" that forms an astute and urgent blueprint for providing a quality education to every American child.
The book features an analysis of teacher reform in Indonesia, which entailed a doubling of teacher salaries upon certification. It describes the political economy context in which the reform was developed and implemented, and analyzes the impact of the reform on teacher knowledge, skills, and student outcomes.
In light of recent sociological events and the COVID-19 pandemic, education has undergone an incredible change in both policy and delivery. As a result, many educators have sought different career paths. It is essential to maintain a concentrated effort to retain educators; however, recruiting teachers into the profession is only one area of focus; there must be intentional support for teacher development along the educator continuum in order to sustain the profession through institutional struggles. The Handbook of Research on the Educator Continuum and Development of Teachers expands on the body of research related to the educator continuum with a holistic view of teacher development. This book combines theory, concepts, and research studies that pinpoint facets of the educator continuum, providing researchers with scholarly contributions that advance the profession. Covering topics such as instructional coaching, special educator career development, and teacher retention, this major reference work is a valuable resource for educational faculty and administration, teacher colleges, educators of K-12 and higher education, pre-service teachers, government officials, teacher education administrators, libraries, researchers, and academicians.
The Office of Educational Research and Improvement (OERI) in the U.S. Department of Education has a mandate for expanding knowledge of teaching and learning and for improving education in this country. This book focuses on how OERI can better fulfill that mission in light of what is known about why prior education reforms have often failed, what is needed to enhance the effectiveness of such efforts, and what education research and development can contribute to better schools. The history, mission, governance, organization, functions, operations, and budgets of OERI are analyzed. Recommendations are made for restructuring OERI, expanding funding, involving scholars from many fields, and engaging teachers and school principals in improvement efforts.
Knowledge of the processes of educational change is said to be the missing ingredient in attempts to bring about educational innovation and reform. Whether these efforts involve grass roots innovation or large-scale societal reform, failure to understand and act on existing knowledge of the change process has accounted for the widespread lack of success in making educational improvements. This volume analyzes what is known about successful or productive change processes, and identifies corresponding action strategies at the individual, school, local and state levels. Included in this book is a major treatment of the topic of the 'ethics of planned change', a neglected topic in recent literature, especially since strategies for intervening in the change process are receiving more attention. This book is intended to be used by teachers in training and in service, teacher trainers, educational researchers, education historians and administrators.
This book sets out to describe the personal experiences of a state worker in Missouri as she attempted to implement educational reform programmes in the late 1980's. This was a critical time in America as other states were mandating new regulations to improve the quality of schools. Problems emerged such as lack of resources, bureaucratic red tape, and a dysfunctional administrative structure caused chaos, hampering the ability of the state workers to regulate and administer the new programmes. Some of the superintendents who did not believe in the new programmes resisted by abusing state funds and witholding information so teachers could not participate. This is a timely case study as legislators play a more important role in developing schools and the state will become the responsible agency to implement reform. Madsen's experience verifies the policy implementation literature and cites several new theoretical perspectives on the important role of the state agency in determining the success or failure of mandated reform programmes. The study indicates the need for state agencies to change their perspectives from regulation to service orientation if reform programmes are to succeed in schools.