The mission of "Excelencia" in Education is to accelerate Latino student success in higher education. A critical group of institutions enrolling and graduating Latino students are Hispanic-Serving Institutions (HSIs). In 2023-24, two-thirds of all Latino undergraduate students in higher education (67%) were enrolled in 602 institutions…

As the complexity of school and district contexts continue to evolve, there is a need to prepare leaders at various points along the leadership continuum. Through this survey research, we analyzed student perceptions of program effectiveness (N = 408) from 2013 to 2020 in one educational leadership program through the lens of student professional…

New pathways are needed to recruit high-quality special education graduates to meet the urgent teacher shortage. As a result, the researchers were awarded a grant from the CEEDAR Technical Assistance Center at the University of Florida to conduct a pilot study on special education teacher recruitment. The pilot study examined the correlation of…

Service-learning is highly praised as a successful pedagogical tool for students' learning. Benefits are attributed to students, the university, and the community. However, the literature also cautions that the benefits of service-learning are largely assumed without empirical testing, warranting a closer review of this pedagogical method. The…

Educational leadership faculty from Florida state-accredited educational leadership programs formed the Florida Association of Professors of Educational Leadership (FAPEL) in 1995 to provide a means through which they could effectively communicate and work together on issues of mutual interest, and for twenty-five years members have collaborated…

The demographic profile of the United States has been rapidly changing; by 2020, minority students will constitute the majority of the public school student population nationwide. This makes cultural competence a necessity for today's school leaders. Educational leadership preparation programs are responsible for preparing culturally competent…

Due to COVID-19, all courses at a regional comprehensive university in the southeastern United States transitioned online and were delivered remotely in the latter half of the spring semester of 2020. In this study, students' performance data from four graduate programs in social sciences and two graduate mathematics programs for the spring…

HBCUs have contributed to the formation of strong leaders who have challenged many assumptions of our nation's founders, defended our sovereignty when attacked by internal and external enemies, and sacrificed for the betterment of their communities. HBCU campuses include opportunities for Black students to engage in religious and community service…

The present study examined how teacher preparation programs and class- and school-level factors impact teacher employment. Using a sample of 121 early-career teachers from four school districts, we examined the effect of a job-embedded master's level teacher-preparation program, in combination with several other factors, on whether or not they…

Contemplating one's teaching has long been an essential part of teacher education. Accordingly, as an instructor of a literacy methods course with a tutoring component, I asked education majors in the class to send me weekly e-mail reflections about their teaching experiences. However, they had difficulty considering their lessons. I knew poetry…

A capstone experience, as an exit degree requirement, allows Master of Public Administration (MPA) students to build quasi-experimental practices by applying learned knowledge and skills throughout their curriculum in the United States. Accredited MPA programs have implemented their capstone courses differently to achieve required standards. Small…

Social work programs in the United States (N = 74) were investigated to determine strategies used for recruiting and retaining MSW students of color. Most schools had student populations exceeding 25,000 and combined BSW, MSW, and PhD programs. Data were collected using a Graduate Recruitment and Retention Scale with corresponding and acceptably…

The purpose of this study was to examine the ability of two educational leadership university programmes to improve the cognitive agility of their graduates. The research looked to discover whether the aspiring principals exited the programmes with an increased ability to employ cognitive agility--the ability to use the multiple thinking skills of…

In this article we describe a graduate program for practicing teachers at the University of Florida. Offered in a blended format (mostly online but supported by a local faculty member), the program embeds graduate work within school reform efforts in hard to staff schools in partner school districts up to 350 miles away from campus in order to…

Community College Baccalaureate (CCB) programs have proliferated during the past two decades but research on post graduate educational pathways CCB graduates follow is limited. The purpose of this multiple case embedded design comparative study (Yin, 2012) was to describe and further understand the experiences of CCB graduates as they explored…