Effective principals are those who boost academic achievement for all students, increase the effectiveness of their teaching staffs, and consistently take leadership actions shown to improve outcomes for students. Therefore principal evaluation systems should place 70% of their weight on the ability of principals to increase student achievement…

Effective, efficient, and sustainable ID/DD organizations: are they possible in today's world of dwindling resources and mounting demands for more and better services? Yes--with the practical tools and strategies in this lifeline for ID/DD leaders. Developed by two of the most trusted authorities in the disability field, this innovative business…

Describes the origins and developmental requirements of the Informant Panel, an inexpensive, time-efficient, retrospective method for obtaining consequently meaningful information needed to guide organizational change projects. The panel combines features of the Nominal Group and Delphi Techniques. (WAS)

This booklet is a reflection on a quarter century of successful leadership in a school that pioneered the nongraded learning environment and demonstrated the effectiveness of other innovations such as team teaching, elimination of tracking, long-term developmental objectives for each student, performance-based assessment, and cooperative learning.…

Preparing Educational Training Consultants (PETC) is a series of cumulative and interrelated instructional materials including training strategies and procedures plus participant instructional materials that can be used as resource materials for training and consulting purposes. It is a package of resource materials that carries with it a change…

An essential part of the school review process is self evaluation, which is fundamental to individual and organizational health and growth. Self evaluation is "coming clean" with ourselves--looking critically at what we are trying to do, how we are doing it, and to what extent it is being done. Self evaluation is important both as an…

The changes required by many school reform policies address problems that are extremely difficult to clarify, with organizational and environmental factors densely intertwined. Accordingly, this document begins by identifying the "four C's" that must be taken into account if any strategy for school improvement is to succeed: complexity,…

Benchmarking is an ongoing, systematic process for measuring and comparing work processes of one organization to those of another to identify best practices. Higher education can gain much from this technique, as industry has. The method is objective, reduces resistance to change and can lead to dramatic innovation and rapid development. (MSE)

The discrepancy between aspiration and achievement of institutional goals is analyzed as an important variable in monitoring an innovation through its life cycle from exploration to institutionalization. Although important, this discrepancy, or hiatus, is not sufficient to support an innovation without the concurrent presence of high aspiration…

COPE (Client-Oriented, Provider-Efficient) methodology, a self-assessment tool that has been used in 35 countries around the world, was used to improve the quality of care in family planning clinics in Kenya. COPE involves a process that legitimately invests power with providers and clinic-level staff. It gives providers more control over their…

An innovative project of cooperative evaluation by principals and teachers of their schools was initiated in 1977 in over 70 large primary schools throughout Queensland, Australia. The background and purposes of the project are described and a schedule for a school evaluation project is suggested. A booklet "A Guide for Cooperative School…

A study investigated the response of faculty and administrators at four United Kingdom universities to implementation of faculty performance appraisal. Overall, staff felt the appraisal had little tangible benefit. Ambiguity over the objective of performance appraisal, as a management tool or for faculty development purposes, is seen as a concern.…

Based on recent school effectiveness literature, this paper suggests local policies to stimulate and facilitate school reform. After discussing the goals of the effective schools movement and briefly reviewing the literature, it presents a two-phase model for school improvement projects, based on the premise that a school's culture primarily…

Organizational development (OD) is a systematic approach to (1) identifying the needs, problems, and objectives of an organization; (2) providing feedback needed for decisions regarding design and implementation of change strategies; (3) implementing and monitoring actions; and (4) evaluating their effects. Decisions in all phases of OD are…

A two-part organizational development project carried out at the University of California San Francisco School of Dentistry is described in this brief report. The project goal was to find out what the school is like and how it is perceived by both staff and students. The first phase, needs assessment, was carried out to identify critical…