Policy Contexts and Interpersonal Relationships: An Exploration of Teachers' Instructional and Assessment Practices

This dissertation consists of three manuscripts that explore teachers’ instructional and assessment practices across varied contexts using qualitative case study research designs. The first manuscript explores Mr. James’s (pseudonym) scaffolding and instructional practices to prepare students for a whole-class discussion on immigration in the 1920s in a high school history class. The second manuscript focuses on the classroom-based assessment practices and decision-making of a 6th-grade history teacher, Mrs. Hall (pseudonym), but also considers the contextual factors that appear to influence her and her school leaders’ decision-making and navigation of a changing assessment policy context. Lastly, the third manuscript investigates two beginning upper elementary mathematics teachers’ (Ms. Scott and Ms. Baker; pseudonyms) access to and utilization of curricular, instructional, and relational resources. This manuscript considers two different institutional contexts and the differing, and at times challenging, relationships that appear to affect the teachers’ access to resources and their exertion of their agency. Thus, from the first to the third manuscript, there is increasingly additional focus on the contextual and relational factors that seem to influence teachers’ instructional and assessment practices.