Middle school is about the growth, potential, and change of adolescents. Students at the middle school age level, generally ages 10 to 14, struggle with the dynamics of making the transitions from recess and active learning in elementary school to multiple teachers, bigger workloads and campuses, and larger student populations (Alexander et al.,…

Broad exploration is often the best way to solve complex problems because the best solution might not come to mind first. Consequently, creative thinking, like simulated annealing, begins with a "hot" exploratory phase of broad solution search and gradually "cools" to exploitation and narrowing the search space. In solving…

Facing a future of rapidly changing technology, collaborative workflow, and expectations for autonomy and agility in the workplace, schools must develop non-cognitive skills for 21st-century learners. Micro-schools, an understudied innovative environment, embed strategies for developing student agency, a non-cognitive trait necessary for…

This qualitative case study explored instructional decisions exemplary primary teachers (kindergarten-third grade) made in order to engage students in mathematics. The phenomenon of teachers altering, supplementing, or utilizing district-given materials to support student engagement and understanding was studied. Specifically, this involved…

This study explores how Black girls express their "Black girl imagination" while participating in a critical, informal science learning program, Empowering Girls Through Art & Science, designed to prioritize the positive visibility of Black girls and promote the critical exploration of scientific histories. The goal of the research…

This dissertation explores two main questions of farmers in Western Kenya -- how they see farming as a creative process and their role in that - and how change is made possible in their community. I explore stories from farmers themselves, using photographs they have taken and stories they tell about those photographs, which answer these two…

This multi-study dissertation explored technology and creativity within three different technology-rich creative musical spaces. Through the use of three contrasting empirical methods (qualitative content analysis, intrinsic case study, and phenomenology), I explored the complex ways technology and musical creativity are linked. In the first…

The purpose of this quantitative quasi-experimental vignette study was to examine the effects of principals' empowering (versus non-empowering) leadership styles and gender on teachers' creativity. Measurement was based on teachers' perceptions of how they would behave creatively if working for a principal described in a randomly assigned vignette…

As schools continue to focus on outcome-based instructional practices, less emphasis is placed on the creativity and reasoning necessary for students to become effective critical thinkers. As a result, students struggle to demonstrate creative problem-solving skills in the classroom. This study examines how the facilitation of an instructional…

Student engagement is a common problem in schools today and a challenging one to solve. Choosing to dive deeper into this complex problem at one high school, ten teachers participated in a coaching cycle designed to impact self-efficacy in student engagement with the support of the school's instructional coach in collaboration with the principal.…

This dissertation evaluates the efficacy of an intervention with decolonizing intentions in a teacher preparation course at fostering a commitment to Culturally Sustaining Pedagogy (Paris & Alim, 2017) among preservice educators. The findings have been distilled to create a prescription that will prepare future educators to disrupt processes…

In an ever-changing environment, higher education must be able to adapt with the times, and key players will be administrators who are prepared for the future. Artists have special skill sets and perspectives which uniquely prepare them for leadership roles, so the purpose of this qualitative dissertation in practice was to identify traits of…

This study examined overall success and creativity in students taking STEM courses at a Midwestern community college. There were four hypotheses in this study. The first was that STEM majors who had taken one or more fine arts courses would report a higher GPA than STEM majors who have not taken fine arts courses. The second was that there would…

Organizations advance and grow by solving problems one at a time, and management graduates should possess critical thinking and problem-solving capacities to be effective business managers and creative engineers. The problem was that critical thinking and creative problem solving are operationally ill-defined in engineering and management…

Learning spaces play an important role in the learning process, as the surrounding environment helps to shape human behavior. Specifically, researchers have suggested that, as a social species, humans interacting in open and social spaces improves their behavior and interaction. Moreover, creativity is one quality that might change depending on…