Personalized Feedback in a Virtual Learning Environment

The immediate shift to virtual instruction during the spring of 2020 forced educators worldwide to quickly adopt distance learning philosophies, technologies, and pedagogies. This lean adoption of virtual learning tools saw an unprecedented number of educators embrace new modalities of providing feedback to students. This paper explores those modalities and recommends that supervisors help educators situate personalized student feedback within the context of self-determination theory to ensure students\u27 needs for competence, autonomy, and relatedness are not abandoned in a virtual learning environment characterized by isolation and loneliness

Structural Leaders: The Intersection of School Principals, Business Leaders, and Social Networks

Educational partnerships are a convenient but underutilized tool in school improvement and reform efforts. Grounded in social capital theory and social network theory, this dissertation study explores the perceptions of school principals, business leaders, and community members on how resources are embedded, accessed, and utilized in local educational partnerships. Social network analysis examined the social network structures underlying the relationships between principals, business leaders, and community members in educational partnerships. The sample selection of five secondary schools provides multiple locations for the study. A total of twelve participants within the same school district in the southeastern United States will participate in this study. Data was gathered through interviews, surveys, and a document review and was analyzed according to the three themes of Lin’s network theory of social capital: 1) resource embeddedness, 2) resource accessibility, and 3) resource utilization. Interviews and documents were analyzed using constant comparative analysis, and survey data were analyzed using descriptive statistics and centrality measures. This study is critical because it takes a network approach with educational partnerships and provides practical insight into how school administrators can refine their business outreach and engagement efforts