This studied investigated parental involvement during the first year of a Chapter I extended-day kindergarten program which sought to promote parents taking an active role in their child's classroom and kindergarten educational experiences. A qualitative design was used to provide information about frequency and types of parental involvement as well as descriptive information about the interactions between parents and children within the classroom. This qualitative design also allowed investigation of the perceptions of the participants. Data analysis was ongoing and inductive; data were collected in the form of field notes, videotapes, audiotapes, interviews and classroom documents. Findings suggest that parental involvement provides benefits for the students, parents, teachers and the school as a whole. Findings also suggest that adult volunteers do not necessarily have to be parents; the adult volunteers could come from segments of the population that are not now fully utilized. Senior citizens and university teacher education students are two groups that could fill the volunteer positions. These findings have implications for the educational community in public schools and in teacher training programs of universities.

The purpose of this investigation was to describe the behavior of effective teachers working within the context of an effective school. The study focused on both the content and techniques of instruction utilized by the teachers. In addition, the research examined teacher behaviors that were external to the classroom setting, including teacher-to-teacher relationships, teacher-to-parent relationships, and teacher-to-principal relationships. A qualitative research design was selected for this study. The site was an inner city elementary campus. Data were collected from eleven K-3 teachers using participant observation and interviews over a seven-month period. Documents were also used as a source of data. The analysis of data was ongoing and cyclical based on the constant comparative method. The final analysis of data resulted in nine themes based on recurring patterns of teacher behavior. The findings suggest that a caring school culture plays an important role in a school's success and the effectiveness of its teachers. Furthermore, there does not appear to be a universal description that fits all effective teachers. Instead, effective teachers in an effective school function as autonomous decision makers in their classrooms, choosing the curriculum and techniques that work best for them and their students. They tend to focus on …

This exploratory case study research was conducted with a view to exploring how teachers teaching emergent bilingual students in ESL programs can enact the principles of culturally sustaining systematic functional linguistics (CS SFL), such as critical centering, historicizing, curricularizing, teaching and learning cycle (TLC), and semantic waving in their classrooms. Two middle school teachers participated in the study and used CS SFL principles to teach their emergent bilingual students. I gathered data for the study through non-participatory observations, semi-structured interviews, informal talks with the teachers, usually right after their classes, and artifacts from teachers and students. The thematic analysis of the data demonstrated that teachers could recognize their students' ways of knowing and being by (a) translanguaging between English and Spanish seamlessly in their classrooms; (b) centering their students' lifeways, prior knowledge, and lived experiences by making them the parts of their curricula; (c) using TLC for creating dialogic interactions between teachers and students and among students; (d) positioning their students through strength perspectives; and (e) using multimodal and multi-semiotic means of communication so that their students can understand their content area knowledge and express their ideas even if their English language is emerging. The teachers faced tensions about whether …