Teachers survive together: Teacher collegial relationships and well-being during the COVID-19 pandemic.

COVID-19 disrupted the ecology of schools and negatively influenced teacher mental health and retention. This mixed-methods study investigates the relationship between teacher well-being and teacher collegial relationships after a year enduring COVID-19 pandemic disruptions. By analyzing data collected through surveys (N = 185) and interviews (N = 27) with U.S. teachers in Spring-Summer 2021, we explore how teacher collegial relationships influenced teacher well-being and unpack how teachers collaborated and supported each other during the pandemic. We find that positive teacher-teacher and teacher-administrator relationships were significantly associated with greater teacher well-being and that teacher-teacher relationships deepened as colleagues engaged in innovative and supportive pedagogical problem solving and provided emotional support, a "silver lining" in education that arose during the pandemic. By sharing and affirming stories of how teachers organized, collaborated, engaged in professional sensemaking, and supported each other's emotional health and resilience, educational leaders can help reaffirm this narrative of teacher collective strength. Moving forward, schools should also create more opportunities for deep teacher collaboration, taking advantage of this opportunity to intentionally build on teachers' growing skills, trust, and capacity to address broad organizational and curricular innovation together. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

Navigating into, through, and beyond the middle grades: the role of middle grades attendance in staying on track for high school graduation.

In this longitudinal study, we investigated the use of attendance during middle school as a behavioral indicator of engagement to predict whether students are on track toward high school graduation. We used administrative data from four cohorts of students in New York City schools (N=303,845) to (a) explore patterns of change in attendance between Grades 4 and 8 and (b) determine the extent to which changes in attendance between Grades 4 and 8 predict which students are on track in Grade 9 for going on to graduate from high school. Results of latent growth modeling indicated that students demonstrate the most substantial declines in attendance during Grade 8 and that attendance changes are most variable in this year, with some students demonstrating much more dramatic declines than others. In addition, these changes in attendance were robust predictors of whether students were on track for high school graduation. To identify students who are at risk for not graduating for the purposes of providing appropriate interventions, educators should pay attention to their commonly collected data on attendance rates as a behavioral indicator of engagement.

Assessing influences on intervention implementation: revision of the usage rating profile-intervention.

Although treatment acceptability was originally proposed as a critical factor in determining the likelihood that a treatment will be used with integrity, more contemporary findings suggest that whether something is likely to be adopted into routine practice is dependent on the complex interplay among a number of different factors. The Usage Rating Profile-Intervention (URP-I; Chafouleas, Briesch, Riley-Tillman, & McCoach, 2009) was recently developed to assess these additional factors, conceptualized as potentially contributing to the quality of intervention use and maintenance over time. The purpose of the current study was to improve upon the URP-I by expanding and strengthening each of the original four subscales. Participants included 1005 elementary teachers who completed the instrument in response to a vignette depicting a common behavior intervention. Results of exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses, as well as reliability analyses, supported a measure containing 29 items and yielding 6 subscales: Acceptability, Understanding, Feasibility, Family-School Collaboration, System Climate, and System Support. Collectively, these items provide information about potential facilitators and barriers to usage that exist at the level of the individual, intervention, and environment. Information gleaned from the instrument is therefore likely to aid consultants in both the planning and evaluation of intervention efforts.