Building Leadership: The Knowledge of Principals in Creating Collaborative Communities of Professional Learning

Research literature is replete with the importance of collaboration in schools, the lack of its implementation, the centrality of the role of the principal, and the existence of a gap between knowledge and practice--or a "Knowing-Doing Gap." In other words, there is a set of knowledge that principals must know in order to create a collaborative workplace environment for teachers. This study sought to describe what high school principals know about creating such a culture of collaboration. The researcher combed journal articles, studies and professional literature in order to identify what principals must know in order to create a culture of collaboration. The result was ten elements of principal knowledge: Staff involvement in important decisions, Charismatic leadership not being necessary for success, Effective elements of teacher teams, Administrator‘s modeling professional learning, The allocation of resources, Staff meetings focused on student learning, Elements of continuous improvement, and Principles of Adult Learning, Student Learning and Change. From these ten elements, the researcher developed a web-based survey intended to measure nine of those elements (Charismatic leadership was excluded). Principals of accredited high schools in the state of Nebraska were invited to participate in this survey, as high schools are well-known for the isolation that teachers experience--particularly as a result of departmentalization. The results indicate that principals have knowledge of eight of the nine measured elements. The one that they lacked an understanding of was Principles of Student Learning. Given these two findings of what principals do and do not know, the researcher recommends that professional organizations, intermediate service agencies and district-level support staff engage in systematic and systemic initiatives to increase the knowledge of principals in the element of lacking knowledge. Further, given that eight of the nine elements are understood by principals, it would be wise to examine reasons for the implementation gap (Knowing-Doing Gap) and how to overcome it.

The Effects Improving Student Discourse Has on Learning Mathematics

In this action research study of my 8th grade mathematics classroom, I investigated how improving student discourse affects learning mathematics. I conducted this study because I wanted to give students more opportunities to develop and share their ideas with their peers as well as with me. My idea was to create a learning environment that encouraged students to voice their opinions. In order to do so, I needed to reassure and model with my students that they were in a classroom where it was safe to take risks, and they should feel comfortable sharing their ideas. By facilitating activities for students to complete in groups, asking students to prepare work to share with the class, and offering more opportunities for students to work with each other on discovering and exploring math skills being presented, I set the tone for abundant student discourse to take place in the mathematics classroom. I discovered that students became more comfortable with math skills the more opportunities they had to discuss the ideas in various settings. I also found that as the study went on, students discovered the importance of being able to share their mathematical ideas and valued the ability to verbalize their thoughts with others. As a result of this study, I plan to continue offering many opportunities for students to work in groups as well as to share their ideas with the class.

Active Learning to Maximize Area Under the ROC Curve

In active learning, a machine learning algorithmis given an unlabeled set of examples U, and is allowed to request labels for a relatively small subset of U to use for training. The goal is then to judiciously choose which examples in U to have labeled in order to optimize some performance criterion, e.g. classification accuracy. We study how active learning affects AUC. We examine two existing algorithms from the literature and present our own active learning algorithms designed to maximize the AUC of the hypothesis. One of our algorithms was consistently the top performer, and Closest Sampling from the literature often came in second behind it. When good posterior probability estimates were available, our heuristics were by far the best.