The concepts of professional learning communities and organizational disciplines support staff development and leadership that lead to sustainable systems. Little research has examined the ability of rural schools to achieve sustainable systems. This quantitative design study considered the relationships between predictor variables of…

The author catalogs her criticisms of inservice practices that provide no meaningful help to the individual teacher, such as general system-wide events, sessions planned and taught by those outside the classroom, programs with inadequate funding or rewards for participation, and programs that offer no follow-up classroom assistance. (SJL)

The author suggests that workshops, evaluation procedures, and institutional policies regarding instructional development should differ according to whether an institution's prevailing attitudes are oriented to consciousness-raising (Stage 1), focal awareness (Stage 2), or subsidiary awareness (Stage 3). Suggestions are made as to which programs…

This document is a compilation of 11 separate reports on the Houston Independent School District (Texas) support program, 1989-90, which paired over 300 first-year teachers with mentors who usually taught the same subject or grade level, were assigned to the same school, were experienced, agreed to work with beginning teachers, and were paid a…

The purposes of this paper were to understand the responses of veteran teachers to a series of inservice workshops designed to increase their knowledge of multicultural issues and to draw implications for the preservice training of teachers. A literature review provided a framework for discussing: (1) the background of multicultural education; (2)…

School climate is defined, four instruments used to assess various dimensions of school climate are described, and implications of a school climate profile for developing an individualized staff development program in a rural school setting are discussed. Developed from the professional literature, the definition of school climate includes the…

The effectiveness of two approaches used by the Ventura-Santa Barbara County (California) School Resource Network to meet district-wide staff development needs is evaluated in this report. A new inservice training method, characterized by facilitation teams working within schools on site-specific needs, is contrasted to a district-wide topical…