The Assistant Principalship: A Keystone or a Stepping Stone

Schools are dynamic environments surrounded by static brick and mortar. Schools are a complex entanglement of systems clinging to normalcy led and composed of individuals seeking growth and progress. There is constant turnover as students move through the systems, gaining mastery, seeking support, and receiving guidance. Employees similarly move often as they change roles and responsibilities, as cultures emerge and evolve, and as individuals retire, are hired, or move on to other positions, commonly referred to as “job rotation.” This constant change affects a school’s culture and climate as each is achieved through sustained efforts. When change is present within the school leadership, specifically those identified as assistant principals within their organizational hierarchy, the impact on school culture may be even more dramatic than the effects felt with the turnover of students and teachers.

Pedagogy in a Potentially Hostile Online Environment

Student-on-student bullying in brick and mortar schools is unfortunately commonplace and has been the subject of research for many years. Alongside the growth of online learning, there has been a corresponding growth in cyberbullying, not only in the student-on-student category, but also student-on-teacher. This new form of bullying can be devastating for the target because, unlike the traditional form of bullying where interactions take place face to face, cyberbullying incorporates email, social media, and texts, which allows the aggression to spread rapidly across a potentially vast range of communication outlets, thus magnifying the effect. Given the potential for significant harm to instructors who are at risk of being targeted by an aggrieved or angry student, more research needs to be done concerning student to teacher cyberbullying. This chapter will examine various cases of student to teacher cyberbullying as well as the role that gender plays in online bullying and end with recommendations for prevention or recourse on the part of the targeted instructor.

Communication With the Blended Student

The ability to communicate effectively, regardless the method, is necessary in all facets of life. In the educational arena, communication between teacher and student has always been a staple of a productive classroom. Unfortunately for today's students and teachers, communication has changed. The days of every student attending a brick-and-mortar classroom are gone. Today's students access technology at a rapid pace via myriad modalities. Some students attend the brick-and-mortar schools, others never step foot inside the facility, while others employ a blended approach to their education. Educators must develop effective techniques to reach these students which engage the learner and reach the course objectives. This chapter focuses on the CoI framework and lists effective communication strategies to communicate with the blended learner. These techniques include a welcome letter, all about me survey, Google forms, email, phone call, text message, reflection assignment, discussion board post, live online class meetings and office hours, and a communication spreadsheet.

Implementation and evaluation of online, synchronous research consultations for graduate students

Purpose Librarians at Northcentral University (NCU) provide online synchronous research consultations for students to discuss resources and search strategies for class assignments, papers, presentations, theses and dissertations. The purpose of this paper is to document the implementation and assessment of this service and to seek to demonstrate that research consultations provided by NCU librarians contribute to students’ learning and success. Design/methodology/approach Research consultations are scheduled using Springshare LibCal and are conducted via Citrix GoToMeeting. Students report their satisfaction and skills learned via the Research Consultation Satisfaction Survey. Dissertation chairs and faculty instructors complete separate surveys, which assess the effect that research consultations had on their students’ work. All surveys were created using Qualtrics. Findings Assessment data reveal that students are satisfied with the research consultation service and can identify specific skills learned. Additionally, faculty and dissertation chairs report an improvement in students’ citations and ability to locate relevant sources. Future research may include examination of learning analytics or citation analysis for students who participated in research consultations. Originality/value Research consultations are rarely documented in the scholarly literature. An opportunity exists to make virtual research consultations more widely adopted as a distinct library reference service, and further, to measure the impact of this service. This project demonstrates how to successfully implement and assess online research consultations. Techniques discussed may be used in 100 per cent virtual environments, as well as within traditional, brick and mortar schools that may already offer face-to-face research consultations.

E-Learning Pedagogy: Addressing Struggling Learners in Regular K-12 Classrooms as an Intransigent Design Problem

As online education providers gain a foothold in the US public education system nationwide as supplemental and primary providers of curriculum materials, they are replicating some of the same pedagogical mistakes that brick-and-mortar schools have created in the curriculum development process—by not accommodating the struggling learner. Our paper and discussion concerns K-12 online content providers and their curriculum development processes.