In education systems around the world, planners and policymakers are calling for more attention to whole-system improvement. To best address teaching and learning outcomes, teachers and head teachers need whole-system support to build professionalism and improve their practice. The middle tier of education systems, composed of professionals…

Reflecting an international trend, Australian education policy increasingly charges schools with fostering active citizens who have the will and capacity to improve the democratic fabric and drive needed social change. This policy prescription also resonates with some teachers' critical commitments to pedagogical practices that encourage young…

This article provides a theory-based, step-by-step approach to intervention development and illustrates its application in India to design an intervention to promote tobacco-use cessation among school personnel in Bihar. We employed a five-step approach to develop the intervention using the Social Contextual Model of Health Behavior Change (SCM)…

Over a three-year period educators at an urban elementary school were interviewed about a Response to Intervention model from development to implementation supported by professional development within a university-school partnership. While the model was initially viewed as an administrative directive, in Year 2 educators began to assume…

As part of its work to advance the multiple pathways approach to high school education, the James Irvine Foundation engaged the Bridgespan Group to develop a framework for assessing the nature and needs of the fields in which nonprofits operate. These agents of change often struggle to understand how to focus their field-building investments and…

This qualitative study examined the process of adopting online education at three private colleges. All three institutions participating in the study were private Catholic colleges that offered their first online courses in the late 1990s. The research question posed for this study was: Within the participating institutions, how did online…

This book provides diagnostic techniques for assessing the needs of school personnel involved in implementing new innovations for school improvement. Using the Concerns Based Adoption Model (CBAM) as a framework, it discusses the roles and personal needs of the people involved in the change process and provides strategies for the total management…

Beginning with an analogy of today's schools as factories, this paper describes the conditions which make it both possible and imperative to transform schools. Examples are given of resources that may be used to support school-based changes, such as foundations, regional laboratories, professional associations, and universities. A model is offered…

Community and junior colleges play a vital role in the economic development process. They serve as catalysts in planning and implementing the efforts of the involved groups. They also provide technical assistance through program offerings, services, and resources. There are specific ways that each group involved can display a commitment,…

As part of a research project on "Patterns of Successful Assistance in Urban School Improvement Programs," this paper presents a case study of an assister's work in the Constituency-Based School Renewal Program (CSR), implemented in an elementary school in Brooklyn, New York. CSR is a program aiming to institute a process by which a…

A key assumption of the Concerns Based Adoption Model (CBAM) is that change is a process, rather than an event. The Procedures for Adopting Educational Innovations Project is working to identify and verify diagnostic dimensions of CBAM, and to develop tools to measure the developmental status of users and non-users; these concepts will help change…

A description is given of three workshops developed to assist school administrators in implementing programs in adapted and developmental physical education for mainstreamed students. The first workshop included information regarding services for the handicapped and approaches to program change in adapted physical education. The curriculum of an…

Examines why an innovative math curriculum promoted by the math department chair was ultimately rejected by teachers. By the second year, faculty ill will, mistrust, and resentment had begun to undermine the math department's ability to function. Wider participation in the adoption effort was needed. (Contains 16 references.) (MLH)

Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University (VPISU) offered in Richmond (Virginia) a cooperative graduate program to prepare inservice administrators to act as change agents in Richmond-area schools. This paper considers the program's purposes, development, implementation, and future. Section I reviews the program's development, discussing…

Maryland's School Improvement Through Instructional Process (SITIP) program involved 24 local education agencies (LEAs) in implementing one or more research-based instructional models: Active Teaching, Mastery Learning, Student Team Teaching, and Teaching Variables. A summary is presented of: (1) descriptions of each of the instructional models;…