Browsing by Subject "Early childhood education--Texas"
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Item Ideas from a balanced "family": the founding and practice of a teacher collaboration(2004) Therrell, James Alan; Reifel, Robert StuartTeachers practicing their profession in isolation, rather than in collaboration, remains a powerful, embedded tradition in American education. Researchers, also under the presumption of teachers isolated in classrooms, have directed few studies that develop or understand teacher collaboration, especially among general education teachers. In response to these circumstances, this study examined the context, content, characteristics, roles, challenges, and patterns, including time usage, of how three teachers founded and practiced their collaboration. The central participants in this case study were three teachers at a public charter school in central Texas, each teaching a K-1 class within the same specially designed classroom. From a constructivist perspective, I focused on how these teachers conducted their collaborative endeavors. Accordingly, I used naturalistic inquiry (Erlandson, et al., 1993) aimed at capturing the current and retrospective perspectives of the participants (via interviews), and which included participant-observation (fieldnotes and digital recordings of the teachers’ discussions) and relevant documents to augment data generation and triangulation procedures. I analyzed data inductively using mostly constant comparison and an interactive, iterative, and recursive consideration of data. My process with participants was collaborative, fostering substantive participant input and decisions from start to finish of the study. My portrayal of this teacher collaboration and its context followed Foley’s (2002) eclectic approach for producing “realist narratives” (p. 487). The chief findings from this study included how the three teachers: (1) practiced an unequal, yet balanced and satisfactory (to the teachers) exercise of power in their decision-making related to their collaborative endeavors; (2) created and employed a foundation of “familial collegiality” to support their generation and planning of ideas in relation to their curriculum and instruction, (3) the teachers established and developed complementary roles from the outset that helped them to sustain their long-term collaboration, (4) as they discussed ideas, the teachers conducted a modified version of a “reach-test” cycle, and (5) apportioned their time between collaborative tasks and relational activities in a ratio of five-to-one.Item Understanding the relationship between Texas' early childhood education delivery system and first grade retention : an ecology systems analysis(2008-05) Gasko, John W., 1973-; Reyes, Pedro, 1954-This study examined which predictor measures best explain first grade retention in Texas, using three campus configuration types. Predictor measures were chosen from Texas public school campus student demographic and operational data, as well as community-based early childhood program data. Prior to this study, no research had been conducted in Texas that merged public school-based early childhood program data with community-based early childhood program data in order to understand a historical and often neglected problem in the state's education system: the number of students being held back in first grade. To determine which predictor measures best explained first grade retention among selected campus configuration types, a hierarchical regression analysis was conducted. Initially, public school campuses that did not contain early childhood and/or pre- kindergarten programs in their campus configuration, and that generally served students with fewer risks for academic and social failure, had lower first grade retention rates, which were statistically significant. After controlling for multiple campus student demographic and operational predictor measures, as well as access to community-based early childhood programs per first grade student, however, campuses that contained early childhood and pre-kindergarten programs, or a combination of both, had retention rates that were no longer statistically different from the campus configurations that, on average, contained fewer economically disadvantaged and at-risk students. Although the study was a systems-level analysis and was restricted to making inferences at the aggregate level that were non-causal, the findings provided several clues that suggest early childhood programs and experiences, both internal and external to public school campuses, have the potential to affect the short- and long-term academic success of vulnerable children. The study encouraged collaboration between the public school system and a complex, diverse community-based early childhood system, using a "vulnerable neighborhood approach" (Bruner,2007), as one effective strategy for promoting school readiness and success for disadvantaged children, and as one means to address this challenge.