Chapters 11, 12, 13, & 14

Chapter 11Resources

Chapter 12Equity Drivers

The chapter discusses the importance of investing resources, time, funding and others to create professional learning communities.

The chapter looks at the importance of all educators being held responsible for the change that happens on campus.

Chapters 11, 12, 13, and 14

Chapter 14Culture of Collaborative Inquiry

Chapter 13 Equity Foundations

The chapter looks at Professional Development being collaborative across all educators.

Sparks discusses that educators should teach "all" children and treated equally.

Article 1: Working with what they have: Professional development as a reform strategy in rural schools.

Findings: Continued investment in PD is crucial, particularly in rural areas where teacher recruitment and retention are challenging. Improving existing teacher skills may be the most effective strategy for improving educational outcomes.

Purpose: Do students whose teachers received PD have higher scores than students whose teachers never had such training?" .

Challenge: Since 2002, NSF has allocated over $800 million to this initiative (PD in Math)" and "received an initial five-year grant of $22.5 million from NSF" (Barrett et al, 2015, p. 3)

Participants: 92 teachers and 18,944 students .

Methodology: Quantitative Research

Article 1: Educators’ beliefs about students’ socioeconomic backgrounds as a pathway for supporting motivation.

Findings: When educators explicitly communicated strengths-based beliefs about lower-SES backgrounds, it positively affected lower-SES students' motivation and persistence without negatively impacting higher-SES students (Silverman et al, 2021, p.227)

Purpose: Examine how educators' beliefs about students' socioeconomic backgrounds influence student motivation and academic outcomes.

Update: Rather than advocating for treating all students exactly the same, it promotes recognizing and valuing the unique strengths that students from different backgrounds bring to their education. (Silverman et al, 2021, p. 227)

Participants: 125 educators, 256 students, 276 university students

Methodology: Quantitative Research

Article 2: Shared principalship: the perspective of close subordinate colleagues.

Findings: "Developing partnerships in communities of practice was important in delivering school improvement"

Purpose: To examine "how hierarchical leadership can be transformed to distributed leadership so that leaders can share the focus on improving school effectiveness and student outcomes" (Döös et al, 2017, p. 2).

Confirm: "Distributing leadership through the inquiry process facilitated a shift in power from top-down descriptive curriculum knowledge to co-created, contextual, and culturally aware knowledge (Döös et al, 2017, p. 15)."

Participants: 2 Principals

Methodology: Mixed Methods

Article 2: Expectation Formation for All? Group Differences in Student Response to Signals about Academic Performance.

Findings: Disadvantaged students, particularly those who are high-performing or from supportive environments, are actually more attentive to academic performance signals than their more advantaged peers.

Purpose: To examine whether socially and academically disadvantaged students respond differently to academic performance signals when forming their educational expectations.

Challenge: "In contrast, low-SES students who are high achievers or come from supportive home environments appear to be the strongest responders to signals about their own academic performance." (Karlson, 2019, p.716)

Participants: 1,049 high school students

Methodology: Quantitative Study

Article 2: Finding rigor within a large-scale Expansion of preschool to test impacts of a Professional Development Program

Findings: Funding was limited, but the PD program was within existing resource constraints and successful..

Purpose: To examine "the impact of investments in PD within the context of an expansion of universal preschool in one of the nation's largest school districts" (p. 1).

Confirm: Implementation decisions had to be adapted "based on local constraints (e.g., number of PD days; funds)" (Rojas et al, 2020).p. 3)

Participants: 95 schools

Methodology: Natural experiment

Article 1: From hierarchical leadership to a mark of distributed leadership by whole school inquiry in partnership with Higher Education Institutions: comparing the Arab education in Israel with the education system in England

Findings: Having multiple leaders increased accessibility for staff

Purpose: To contribute knowledge about how shared principalship is experienced

Confirm: "Close subordinates stress the importance of leaders being accessible, and therefore highlight the value of having more than one person to go to" (Arar & Taysum, 2019, p. 160)

Participants: 18 teachers and 2 viece principals

Methodology: Qualitative Research

Article 2: Exploring collaborative professionalism as a means of virtually supporting rural teachers.

Findings: "Evidence of solidarity and solidity built over the sessions... The initial sessions included an emphasis on less critical dialogue that built the togetherness and trust of the group." (Inouye et al, 2023, p.21-22)

Purpose: To examine how collaborative professionalism could be built virtually to support geographically isolated rural teachers. (Inouye et al, 2023, p.14)

Confirm: Collaboration is vital for rural teachers who may be isolated and have few or no colleagues teaching the same subjects in their schools, as well as geographic barriers, and it supports teacher professional development (Inouye et al, 2023).

Participants: 9 teachers

Methodology: Mixed Methods

Article 1: Teachers´ collaborative work: new toward for teacher´s development.

Findings: Collaborative work as essential for professional development and school improvement.

Purpose: The study aimed to explore teachers' experiences with collaborative work and identify factors that facilitate or hinder peer collaboration

Confirm: School leadership should formalize and support collaboration, with proper time and structures provided for teachers to work together effectively. (Aparicio-Molina & Sepúlveda-López, 2019, p. 2).

Participants: 9 teachers

Methodology: Qualitative case study