When created and operated appropriately, school-site councils can be a very useful component of school renewal. Councils are difficult to create, since members must shift roles, compromise strongly held beliefs, and invest considerable time, energy, and know-how. Advantages of group decision making are bringing diverse experience and expertise to…

A study examined the impact of work teams on production, quality, and morale within the State of Alaska Division of Vocational Rehabilitation, using data from fiscal years 1992 and 1993 when a change from a hierarchical organization to a team-based approach took place in the agency. Production was defined as the percentage of placements achieved…

Case studies are presented of three gifted students, indicating the social and academic problems which are standing in the way of their potential development. The students include a Vietnamese-American ninth-grade girl who has difficulty with English and does not feel accepted by other students, an underachieving seventh grade boy who speaks out…

This booklet synthesizes symposium discussions exploring how to transform organizations to compete in the rapidly changing world economy. First, the new cooperative organization is defined. Next, practical advice on making partnership organizations a reality is summarized. Suggestions include appealing to people's self-interest; coming up with…

The paper describes application of an interactive model to providing services for young children with special needs being mainstreamed in community day care programs. In this model, the resource consultant coordinates service delivery in interactions with: (1) the child and family; (2) early childhood educators; and (3) resource specialists. The…

The goal of this guide is to provide Massachusetts teachers of visually impaired students with an opportunity to increase the quality of evaluation procedures through a more consistent approach to assessment and to provide a means of recording the outcomes of such assessment procedures in more meaningful ways. The guide covers basic elements…

The article aims at exploring what counts as successful leadership and what the key questions in exploring successful school leadership across countries should be. A main argument is that successful leadership is a contestable concept, and I argue for framing school leadership as a moral and democratic enterprise, which implies a need to protect…

This paper describes the development and current state of videodisk technology in Canada. The first section focuses on the technology itself, i.e., the disks, disk players, and the possibilities they offer for interaction between learner and machine. The current costs of the technology and the probable effect of these costs on the market are also…

In 1988 the Collective Bargaining Forum, a private group of labor and business leaders, adopted a statement of principles recognizing that the institution of collective bargaining is an integral part of economic life in the United States. The purpose of the statement was to facilitate the spread of positive relations between labor and management…

This report describes the development in 1986 of a management information system by the Sacramento City (California) Unified School District for use in high schools. A nine-page attachment, which comprises two-thirds of the report, offers profiles of selected schools drawn from the databases. Data sets of 200 information items, collected from all…

The reward structure of a classroom refers to the means by which a teacher motivates students to perform school tasks. This document reports on a study in which academic achievement in competitive and reward-structured environments was examined in two high school sophomore level biology classes of equal academic ability. Each class was pretested…

A year-long, cooperatively structured, student team strategy is described that is being used as a major component in an interdisciplinary Master of Environmental Science degree program. The general philosophy of the degree program and the rationale for including the Student Team Project (STP) are described. The most basic goal of the program is…

The effectiveness of the student teacher supervisory process can be improved through the use of a model based on current administrative and supervisory theory. A review of literature on the process indicates that a closer collaboration between supervisor and cooperating teacher is needed, cooperating teachers need training in supervision, and…

The Pine County (Minnesota) Special Education System has adapted a database for use in decision making regarding programs for learning disabled and behavior problem students. The system is used for decisions in seven areas: identification, initial assessment, eligibility determination, individualized education program (IEP) selection, IEP…

An interactive research and development (IR&D) project brings together teachers, university researchers, and staff development specialists as a team to identify, research, and disseminate findings from questions of interest to teachers. Six major features of an interactive IR&D project are: (1) teams having at least one teacher, one researcher,…