The Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning (CASEL) launched the Collaborating Districts Initiative (CDI) with the goal of supporting school districts to build their capacities to promote social and emotional learning (SEL) for all students. Twenty large, urban districts across the country participate in the CDI. Although many…

The community schools strategy transforms a school into a place where educators, local community members, families, and students work together to strengthen conditions for student learning and healthy development. As partners, they organize in- and out-of-school resources, supports, and opportunities so that young people thrive. A growing number…

Researchers and evaluators increasingly use focus groups as a culturally responsive (CR) method to facilitate empowerment -- especially among vulnerable groups. Yet, the expansion of this practice muddles the concept of empowerment and purposes for using focus groups for empowerment. Of particular need is a clear differentiation of the purposes…

This study explores the link between principals' leadership practices and learning achievements from a distributed leadership perspective, using semi-structured interviews with TVET supervisors, middle leaders, and teachers. A detailed discussion on how school principals actually practised distributed leadership (DL) and how these practices…

After decades of market-based education reforms, the landscape of urban school districts across the country have been transformed. Yet, this is neither a sign of the effectiveness of such reforms nor a widespread consensus over the contents and form of urban schooling. Education reform remains a wicked problem, particularly along racial lines,…

Title 1 principals face many day-to-day challenges due to the complexity and demands of their jobs. Research has found (Levin et al., 2019) that principals valued professional development (PD) more if it allowed them to address their school's specific needs and circumstances and increase their leadership capacity. This research aims to explore the…

Minority and other at-risk students are disproportionately affected by punitive disciplinary practices in schools. These disciplinary actions' long-term and short-term effects include losing instructional time, low academic achievement, dropping out of school, and a chance of becoming part of the school-to-prison pipeline. Implementing restorative…

Chinese business leaders suffered from the crisis of COVID-19 and the Double Reduction Policy, and used various strategies and learning practices to survive the crisis. The purpose of this modified exploratory multicase study was to explore how leaders in the Chinese tutoring industry made sense of the crisis of the Pandemic and the Double…

This study collects perceptions from educators about how pedagogical practices could be transformed for a learner-centered concentration in active learning spaces to support student engagement. Seven participants provide data through a focus group, interviews, and observations. Four main themes are identified: (1) Collaboration and Engagement, (2)…

In an environment of increased accountability and autonomy for school leaders, insufficient assistance relationships between school leaders and district staff hinder the ability of principals to utilize autonomy in ways that translate to improved instruction and student performance. This study sought to examine and strengthen the assistance…

This empirical work is driven by a study on the experiences and motivation of a group of college-aged student activists. Using a cohort of 14 millennial-aged activists who organized their work in response to a rise of right-wing authoritarianism in national and state politics, this paper presents recommendations for how student affairs…

COVID-19 requires educational leaders to collectively make sense of their inclusive practices. This qualitative study explores how COVID-19 crisis shaped Israeli superintendents' and principals' role in fostering school sense-making processes during a reform based on Amendment No. 11 to the Special Education Law. Data were collected with 22 Jewish…

The Region 15 Comprehensive Center (R15CC) is federally funded to provide high-impact, customized, and responsive capacity-building technical assistance to state educational agencies (SEAs) in Arizona, California, Nevada, and Utah. In 2022, R15CC established a regional Family and Community Engagement (FACE) Collaborative for SEA leaders in…

This chapter will highlight the process of engaging Black college men in leadership learning by centering their intersecting identities. We employed liberatory pedagogy through an anti-deficit achievement framework for course design and delivery. The chapter addresses the importance and implications of understanding how engaging with same-race and…

This paper presents the operation of the educational software, Real Estate Data Analyzer, to teachers and future teachers. It is a specific software that allows students carry out complete statistical analysis projects on the characteristics of the buildings that surround them.