Although teachers and administrators have been treated as subject matter for numerous major reports on American education, seldom have they been asked to analyze their own situation and to propose their own solutions. This report presents the observations and recommendations of the Select Seminar on Teacher Evaluation comprised of 9 master…

Raising professional standards and improving teacher preparation programs will have little effect unless teaching becomes a more attractive career. Local administrators should involve faculty members effectively and satisfactorily in the decision-making and management process so that teachers don't need to enlist collective bargaining to force…

Attempting to address the unique situation of beginning teachers and respond to increasing interest in teacher training, certification, support systems, and teacher empowerment, the Select Seminar for Beginning Teachers drew together 11 new teachers, 4 returning teachers, and 5 administrators from 16 school districts in upstate New York. This…

Paradoxically, although major forces in society are pushing for improvement in the American educational system, many teachers experience job overload, isolation, and increasing despair. This book is the first in a trilogy designed to help teachers and principals fight for fundamentally positive changes that will benefit themselves and their…

Scholars working from various perspectives are beginning to define teaching as a decision-making process. Research shows that teachers are reflective and connect knowledge to situations through observation, understanding, analysis, interpretation, and decision-making. This paper provides empirical evidence to show the relationship of…

Recently, the traditional school structure has been harshly scrutinized for several key defects, including bureaucratic rules and regulations, professional isolation of teaching staff, evaluation systems irrelevant to instructional improvement, low teacher participation in decision making, and noncooperation between teachers and administrators.…

The influence of faculty characteristics, perceptions, and work environment on job satisfaction and identification with the institution was studied. Questionnaire responses from 9,237 faculty were evaluated, based on a 1971 survey conducted by the Stanford Project on Academic Governance. The following faculty characteristics were considered: time…

A growing number of educators are focusing their efforts on improving the work environment of teaching. In place of the typical school's norms and practices that isolate teachers from one another, collaborative schools have norms that encourage teachers and principals to cooperate for school improvement. Such schools are characterized by frequent…

In 1990, William Rainey Harper College (WRHC) participated in the annual faculty survey conducted by the Higher Education Research Institute in California. Of WRHC's full-time faculty, 97 responded to the survey for a 50% response rate. Results from the survey were compared with those from two-year and four-year institutions nationwide. In…

This review summarizes the rapidly growing body of findings on the social and organizational environment of teaching and examines one innovation--the collaborative school--that offers promise of an organizational context more conducive to effective teaching. Chapter 1 characterizes the actual conditions under which teachers work, focusing on…

This annotated bibliography was prepared to serve as background material for the writing of the synthesis paper "From Isolation to Collaboration: Improving the Work Environment of Teaching." Items were selected to represent the range of issues that pertain to the social and organizational context of teaching. The selected materials…

Planning for conversion to a year-round school in James Monroe School, Madera, California, began in 1984 as educators and community faced the fact that continued enrollment increases had reached a critical point. This report describes program development and implementation; an appendix with program worksheets comprises over one-half of the…

This personal report of classroom experiences at an urban commuter college relates the experiences of a teacher and a group of working-class students studying the book "Utopia," which is also the metaphor for the hoped-for learning experience. The book, illustrated by excerpts from student-submitted work, shows how pedagogical theory leads to…