To meet public scrutiny and increased demands for quality public education, schools must plan. Developing legitimate plans depends on the ability to recognize the patterns that guide current practice and uncover those that will create change. Educators need to understand the planning concepts that have helped business meet new challenges. To bring…

This review of effective practices in state-wide systems change was conducted as part of the PEERS (Providing Education for Everyone in Regular Schools) Project, a 5-year collaborative systems change project in California to facilitate the integration of students with severe disabilities previously at special centers into services at regular…

This book, which is intended primarily to assist individuals charged with helping organizations implement career development systems, examines successful career development practices in U.S. and foreign organizations. Part 1 examines the state of the practice as determined by various surveys, including an American Society for Training and…

This document presents two papers given at a 1996 conference on children's mental health. The first paper is "New Approaches to Evaluating Systems" by Heather B. Weiss. This paper discusses the need for evaluations of systems change through the development and use of evaluation databases of both comprehensive programs and system reform efforts. It…

This paper presents a holistic conceptualization of the school as an autonomous system. Two major scientific paradigms, reductionism and holism, are outlined and their impacts on educational administration are discussed. Findings of a study that investigated the participation of the governing bodies of independent schools in the schools'…

This book is designed for use as a theoretical and practical tool for planning and implementing secondary school change. Chapter 1 presents the history of the development of the CaMaPe models and a perspective on the universality of educational and organizational structures and describes the kinds of schools appropriate to the models. The basic…

Educational visions developed by two participants in the Education 2000 project--Redwood Falls, Minnesota, and Yonkers, New York--are described in this paper. An overview of the blueprints that are being developed from these visions is provided as well as a description of the design process. The Education 2000 process offers a new design for…

Widespread educational reform will occur only if encouraged by a coherent policy environment that explicitly supports fundamental change and unleashes the imagination and energy of students, teachers, parents, and community leaders. To prepare students well for the 21st century, our education system requires an interdisciplinary environment, a…

A framework is presented for evaluating family centers in the context of the community environment. The family centers will be created in a variety of communities and under varying auspices. Several will be selected as prototype centers and, as such, will need more elaborate evaluation plans than the others. Prototype centers will need to evaluate…

This chapter, from a guide for designing, implementing, and evaluating instruction and services for students with disabilities, acquaints the education administrator with the what, why, and how of interagency collaboration. System-level interagency collaboration involves joint planning, joint implementation, and joint evaluation between…

Research that identifies factors that facilitate information processing and enhance performance without reducing group confidence and decision satisfaction may influence future development of groupwork systems. This paper contains a review of the literature on cognitive and motivational issues in both group decision-making and learning contexts…

This report from a study group on long-term mental illness (LTMI) examines three components of the vocational rehabilitation process (the client, the counselor, and the programs) and the systems through which the three components interact. The first chapter discusses the history and evolution of the vocational rehabilitation (VR) and mental health…

Latin American countries have a long history in the application of educational technology to the improvement of teacher education. Even though past innovations, such as the Multinational Project on Educational Technology have been successful, there are still problems with the quality of teacher education. Apparently, processes have been improved…

Research in organizational development and ecological psychology has demonstrated the importance of viewing organizations from a systems perspective. Organizational innovations are planned, designed, and implemented in increasingly complex and dynamic ecosystems. This paper presents a model of organizational change which was developed using a…

Jessica Yood argues that Writing Across the Curriculum (WAC) initiatives can help us better understand how the academy can act in the information age. Drawing on her observations of a newly emerging WAC program, she offers "an alternative approach to the traditional lens we use to look at disciplines or culture" and suggests that we…