Orange County Public Schools (OCPS) is the public school district for Orange County, Florida. It is based in the Ronald Blocker Educational Leadership Center in downtown Orlando. As of the 2020-21 school year, OCPS has an enrollment of 206,058 students, making it the 9th largest school district in the United States and the fourth largest in Florida. The school district also employs over 25,125 instructional and classified employees, which make up more than 95% of the OCPS work force.
Abstract This article highlights the experiences of multiple university instructors and two students in an orientation and mobility (O&M) program as it relates to training future professionals with visual impairment or hearing loss. Many perceive vision loss as a significant tragedy, often associating it with limitations and dependence. For some, hearing loss is also thought to limit independence. In the past, it was thought that vision was necessary to teach O&M. Misconceptions about the abilities of persons with vision loss can create barriers to truly inclusive and effective training. However, by fostering an open and adaptive learning environment, instructors can ensure that their teaching methods empower blind and low vision students and students with hearing loss to safely and effectively teach independent travel. Co-creating learning experiences and exploring a constructivist approach utilizing students’ lived experiences can transform the field and provide role models for students and clients alike. This article is a personal accounting of challenges, resources, and resiliency that have led to inclusion of students with vision loss and hearing loss in an O&M personnel preparation program.
AbstractStudents in Confucian culture are typically high-achieving on international assessments such as PISA and TIMSS. To explore factors that may explain the high performance of Confucian students, the present study compared the latent subpopulations of school resources and disciplinary climate in two Confucian countries and two Anglo countries. Using Latent Profile Analysis, the results identified the same number of school profiles in the two countries in the two cultures, and these profiles were similar in their levels of disciplinary climate and school resources. The percentage of high-discipline school profiles is about 11.72% higher in Confucian countries than in Anglo countries. In addition, in both cultures, students who attended high-discipline schools were from higher socioeconomic status (SES) families and performed better in science. These results revealed the importance of the disciplinary climate for a school to be effective and provided evidence indicating that Confucian culture has more schools with a positive disciplinary climate.
Partnerships among professionals within urban school districts and teacher preparation programs are necessary to address teacher shortages through innovative and sustained professional learning from initial clinical experiences through induction (Yendol-Hoppey & Hoppey, 2018). A collaborative model of teacher preparation was envisioned and implemented by faculty and administrators in a large, urban school district to address teacher shortages through continued professional learning, coaching, mentoring, and supports within High Need Schools (HNS). The focus of this manuscript describes an enhanced partnership model and specific programmatic components of a reconceptualized continuum of professional learning and roles by university faculty, supervising teachers, and preservice teachers. Specific impacts from program implementation are shared. Lastly, considerations for enhancement and sustainability of the innovative model are described.
This chapter presents a curriculum development partnership that brings together a state department of education Holocaust education task force, K-12 and university Holocaust and civics content and pedagogy experts, and a university civic education institute. Through this partnership, the Holocaust-civics curriculum was developed. The Holocaust-civics curriculum is based on Florida’s Next Generation Sunshine State Standards (NGSSS) for Social Studies civics and government standards in a manner that brings Holocaust content into middle school civics. Florida is unique as the sole state requiring a high-stakes middle school civics exam developed and administered by the state. That high stakes exam tests 40 benchmarks covering four standards. By contrast, Florida is one of the earlier states to mandate Holocaust education, in 1994. That mandate includes content-focused teaching requirements although no courses or subjects, benchmarks, or grade levels are identified in that mandate. Bringing the Holocaust education mandate into middle school civics enhances the likelihood that students will learn the lessons of the Holocaust because the Holocaust is then taught as part of the required civics course. The partnership approach that brought together civics and pedagogy experts from the K-12 and university communities under the auspices of the state department of education task force devoted to Holocaust education presented here proved an effective model for developing the Holocaust-civics curriculum.
