This case was written for school leaders, specifically for administrators interested in addressing and improving school culture. Often efforts to address toxic culture and organizational change result in resistance, requiring leadership that is capable of influencing and inspiring cultural transformation. However, leaders who embark on these types…

The rapidly changing world and the increasingly complex demands placed on schools because of that change has led to an increasing awareness that the school principal alone cannot provide all of the leadership necessary for school development. More and more school districts are asking teachers to share leadership responsibilities with school…

This study concerns how intra-organizational networks affect the implementation of policies and practices in organizations. In particular, we attend to the role of the informal subgroup or clique in cultivating and distributing locally adapted and integrated knowledge, or know-how. We develop two hypotheses based on the importance of…

"School Budget Hold'em" is a game designed to help school districts rethink their budgeting process. It evolved out of Education Resource Strategies' (ERS) experience working with large urban districts around the country. "School Budget Hold'em" offers a completely new approach--one that can turn the budgeting process into a long-term visioning…

The idea that social relations can aggregate into social capital has intuitive appeal that scholars are finding useful as they seek to explain variations in community outcomes. This article suggests that it may be time for metropolitan university administrators to begin thinking beyond community relations or community engagement as they seek to…

Representative democracy relies on the informed trust of the citizens. School board members serve their communities at a crucial place, governing large sums of money and the future of the community's children. Without the informed trust of the citizens, this enterprise will fail. Trust may be lost directly, or through inattention to detail. One of…

Purpose: Although conflict has traditionally been considered destructive, recent studies have indicated that conflict management can contribute to effective teamwork. The present study explores conflict management as a team phenomenon in schools. The author examined how the contextual variables (task interdependence, goal interdependence) are…

Purpose: This paper develops a theoretical framework to guide future inquiry into board governance of independent schools. Design/methodology/approach: The authors' approach is to integrate literatures related to corporate and educational boards, motivation, leadership and group processes that are appropriate for conceptualizing independent school…

This two-volume work is intended to help readers develop powerful new ways of thinking about organizational principles, and apply them to policy-making and management in colleges and universities. The book is written with two audiences in mind: administrative and faculty leaders in institutions of higher learning, and students (both doctoral and…

For educators to be successful in teaching students to step up and become tomorrow's innovators, they must become innovators themselves. Enter school leadership. This article provides 10 practical steps any superintendent, principal, or other administrator can take to help make that happen: (1) Go on record; (2) Model innovation; (3) Pollinate;…

This case study is a continuation of a research project that investigated 149 mentoring teams in four school districts over a two-year period. The primary goal in the first phase of the study was to identify mentoring teams that were regularly encountering problems, introduce intervention procedures, and assess the effectiveness of those…

Purpose: This article explores distributed leadership as it relates to two teacher teams in one public secondary school. Both situational and social aspects of distributed leadership are foci of investigation. Methods: The qualitative study used constant comparative analysis and discourse analysis to explore leadership as a distributed phenomenon.…

What do leaders mean when they talk about networks and whether leadership networks have the power to transform the profession? When it comes to educational leadership networks, there certainly are more than seven important questions. This article focuses on seven key questions about networking in the superintendent ranks by the coordinator of one…