This paper explores the creation, organizational stages, intervention activities, and outcomes of the School Improvement Resource Team (SIRT) in the Buffalo Public Schools (New York) from 1977 to 1980. Intended primarily to defuse tensions during implementation of court ordered desegregation, the SIRT effort serves as an apparently successful…

Staff development activities that affect professional ability must be coupled with efforts toward organizational development if two additional determinants of performance, employee motivation and organizational climate, are to be significantly improved. Indeed, emphasis on staff development alone may have negative effects in that such an approach…

In establishing a secondary school teacher/advisor system and advisory group, the advisor should direct his efforts toward and encourage decisions about three critical areas: the state of the group and possible enabling norm patterns; the conditions of openness, trust, and safety in the group; and the student in relation to the group processes.…

The application of behavioral technology to integrate individual needs for growth and development of secondary students with the organizational goals of the schools is discussed. It is emphasized that learning designs in the school should be utilized to give teachers, pupils, and administrators an opportunity in varied group mixes to participate…

This guide focuses on the major tasks involved in organizing, planning, and implementing a permanent planning program for foster care. Phase I is concerned with how to organize administrative support for the program so that program planning and implementation can proceed. It also discusses how to overcome some possible hurdles in working to gain…

This chapter of "The Best of the Best of ERIC," Volume 2, contains 16 summaries of documents and journal articles on improving school climate, all of which are indexed in either "Resources in Education" or "Current Index to Journals in Education." The materials included deal with various aspects of this topic, such as…

An exercise is presented that is designed as a training aid for junior administrative and/or academic staff in their first 6 years of service in universities. It is intended to help participants think about management principles in general while trying out their own ideas for solving the specific problems outlined. It will also permit individuals…

The reconciliation of federal purposes (to bring change to those who do and those who don't welcome it) with a user-driven system (a system that maximizes user self-determination) is the basic paradox analyzed in this speech. One of the principles of organizational development is that unless the individual's perceived self-interest can be engaged,…

This paper reexamines the concept of organizational maintenance and argues that the common assumption of an inverse relation between maintenance and the sensitivity of organizations to client needs is not valid. A logical analysis suggests that maintenance should lead to a greater sensitivity to environmental forces that control important…

A guide for agencies in setting up new employee development programs or a tool for assessing existing ones, the paper presents an eight-step process for organizational training. Step 1 commences with the identification and ranking of learning needs, or conducting a needs assessment. Step 2, selection of learning objectives, includes a job analysis…

Six major causes of organizational conflict (individual stress, role conflict, power struggles, differentiation, interdependence, and external pressures) are delineated; implications for managing these conflicts using collaboration, bargaining, and power plays are pointed out; a conflict management paradigm pointing out which mode of conflict…

As academic libraries increase in size and become more complex, their organization tends to become more bureaucratic in nature and resistant to change. This paper describes a range of both internal and external strategies which have been used to introduce constructive change into the management of academic libraries in North America and the major…

Research into the process of educational change has centered largely around the diffusion concept--the spread or permeation of an innovation from system to system or from school to school throughout a particular state or number of states. It is as if many teachers and administrators have understood the purpose of educational change to be the…

Differentiated staffing has emphasized development of teacher leadership roles, the importance of shared decision making in schools, and the constructive ways in which paid instructional aides and volunteer aides can support the professional teaching staff. Eighteen annotated bibliographic citations concerning the various aspects of differentiated…

This study attempted to examine the organizational structures of elementary schools in terms of complexity, centralization, formalization, stratification, and job satisfaction; and to analyze the relationship of these variables to the adaptiveness of elementary schools. More specifically, it compared the Multiunit School-Elementary (MUS-E) type of…