In spite of tough financial times, resourceful school leaders devise ways to overcome challenges and improve education. To do this, they make strategic use of the resources they have. And they also cultivate learning communities. In this article, Elizabeth A. City describes how school leaders can make more strategic use of three essential…

Colleges and universities have got a big problem: how to bake a wireless network as good as Mom's. The problem is that enterprise wireless networks "tend to be a little more finicky" than the home ones. While the home devices are plug-and-play, enterprise networks force IT departments to manage client issues such as drivers and settings. It's a…

State education agencies (SEAs) are under fire and face new expectations from all sides. The federal government, state legislatures and governors, and citizens themselves are calling upon the SEA to do "more"--more to improve outcomes for students, more to close the achievement gap, and more to meet the diverse instructional needs of students.…

Despite the recent push to design and adopt educator evaluation systems, many states and local educational agencies (LEAs) have focused primarily on teacher evaluations and lack the appropriate attention to design and implementation of school leader evaluations and aligned professional development. And, since principals are responsible for…

Historically, the early childhood care and education (ECCE) workforce has been characterized as a low-education, low-compensation, low-stability workforce. In recent years, considerable investments have been made to correct this, but we lack evidence about the extent to which these investments were accompanied by changes in the characteristics of…

Faced with the challenges of the changes in: higher education, educational developers' roles and the use of innovation to stimulate change, this study aimed to synthesise literature dealing with the diffusion of innovative learning and teaching practices in higher education to determine what lessons could be learnt. The findings suggest that the…

Distance education and its relationship to emerging computer technologies have together offered many promises to the field of education. In practice however, the combination often false short of what it attempts to accomplish some of the short comings are due to problems with the technology; others have more to do with administration,…

A substantial body of literature has highlighted many factors that impede faculty change, the most common of which are a lack of training, time, and incentives. However, there may be other barriers--unacknowledged and unexamined barriers--that might prove to be equally important. In particular, the tensions between a scientist's professional…

Over the past decade, human performance technology (HPT) has become an important source of rigor and application in support of best practices in capacity development. HPT shares common principles with the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development best practices. This article explores HPT's critical role as the methodology of choice…

This paper presents a practitioner's view on student system implementations in the Australian university sector. A student information system is a core system of any university and integral to its operations and services to students. These systems are constantly on the list of major projects and at any point in time, a university is either…

In the 2000 movie "The Perfect Storm," there is an unusual convergence of several critical weather factors that set the stage for a destructive outcome that takes both property and lives. It has become a popular metaphor to describe how events come together in a unique way to have an exceptional influence on something, typically a negative impact.…

This article examines teacher leader role development and definition by looking at one emergent model of distributed leadership: the hybrid teacher leader (HTL). HTLs are teachers whose official schedule includes both teaching K-12 students and leading teachers in some capacity. Participants included six HTLs across four school districts over 2…

Teachers play a vital role in the implementation of new programs. This article discusses how best to support teachers in the face of such change. Specifically, we describe the perspectives of teachers who participated in a pilot project of the responsiveness to intervention model. Through focus group data, the researchers explored the barriers…

Most executives have not heard of human performance technology (HPT), but a recent Google search showed 25 times more Google hits for "lean six sigma" than for "human performance technology." This article describes five factors that make HPT a hard sell: (1) HPT is not part of standard business jargon, (2) organizational executives associate…

The learning curve is high for novice special education teachers. They must assume full teaching responsibilities, while at the same time become familiar with district and school policies, curriculum, and assessment policies and procedures. They are expected to build relationships with administrators, teachers, paraprofessionals, families, and…