As part of the process of redefining institutional growth and vitality, the Dallas Community College District is attempting to become a "learning society," that is, an institution which is capable of on-going critical self-examination, which is process-oriented, and which encourages the development of new ideas. The major components…

Organizational development (OD) can be of value as a professional development tool in the school, especially where it can broaden the perspective of the teacher so that he can conceptualize the school as an organization with various related units working to achieve the same goal, see more clearly his place in the total educational program of the…

Schools face frightening challenges in the decades ahead, and a fundamental question of education is how they will cope. Organization Development (OD), a process designed to help organizations meet the challenges of pervasive change, appears capable of helping in this situation. There have been several OD applications in schools, but no definitive…

This paper proposes viewing students as full-fledged organizational members who participate in school planning, problem-solving, and decision-making about school curriculum, grading policies, teacher evaluation procedures, budget, and the like. Three tested strategies are described that help students increase their understanding of how the school…

The cooperative program for competency-based teacher education (CBTE) and individually guided education (IGE) operating in the Toledo, Ohio, area is described. Planning, development, design, and redesign processes of the program (which involves the University of Toledo, and public and private schools in the district) are surveyed. Nineteen forces…

This five-part paper provides an overview of the use of quality circles as a participative management technique in community colleges. Section I offers an introduction to the technique, reviewing the history of quality circles from their development in Japan in the early 1960s to their introduction in American higher education in the early 1980s.…

The purposes of this paper are to describe a data-based organizational renewal effort in a school district, explain the application and utility of the collaborative process used, and discuss the implications of such activities for building-level delivery of educational services, particularly in the area of decision-making. Although the project was…

An attempt to develop a long-range, comprehensive approach to inservice education in a midwestern school system is described. A five-step sequence of activities was followed: (1) relationshiP building with administrators, a representative teacher group, and students; (2) diagnosis of system needs through site visitations; (3) survey of teacher…

This paper on the training of industrial and organizational (I/O) trainers, is written for undergraduate psychology curriculum developers, to provide information relevant to the preparation of psychology students for entry level positions in training and development. The eight phases in the development and implementation of a training program are…

This document presents an overview of the Jamesville-DeWitt-Syracuse University Teaching Center. Founded in 1975, the Teaching Center has two major foci--the provision of personalized and individualized field experience for the preservice university student and ongoing inservice teacher staff development. The paper describes the conceptual bases…

Program evaluators and program managers should examine appropriate dimensions of innovations when deciding to support, accept, or reject an educational innovation. Survey questionnaires were used with 76 teachers and administrators and 65 state supervisors and local project directors of exemplary programs to obtain a list of 38 "essential"…

This paper clarifies the problems of meaning and translation into practice of concepts of "quality" in higher education by examining a quality improvement program at Griffith University (Queensland, Australia). The paper notes that Australian government agencies have advanced a quality assurance (QA) approach concerned with the…

A patient education evaluation project and how it applies or might be useful to other hospital settings is discussed in this paper. The following topics are included: United Hospitals (St. Paul, Minnesota); situation and approach to patient education; description of the patient education evaluation project, including design, criteria, and elements…

The paper analyzes structure and organizational communication within the League of Women Voters. The document is presented in three major sections. The first section traces the history of the League of Women Voters from its origins in the women's suffrage movement to its current involvement with international relations, human rights, and…