English language learners (ELLs) are a significant and growing subset of the school age population across the United States. The projected growth of ELL students is significant and poses unique challenges for school districts when assessing bilingual students for special education. The state of California has the most ELL students in the nation…

The Center on School Turnaround at WestEd has developed a framework to assist states, districts, and schools in leading and managing rapid improvement efforts. The framework shares, in practical language, the critical practices of successful school turnaround in four domains, or areas of focus, that research and experience suggest are central to…

Factors external and internal to social work practice have caused our profession to question its role and identity. The emergence of evidence-based or evidenced informed practices forces the profession to reexamine its unique identity and its historical roots. This article addresses the problems in the dominant paradigm guiding our profession, the…

Students enrolled in a Corps of Cadets program at Texas A&M University [N = 336] were surveyed to examine their leadership mindsets and whether their participation in a formal academic leadership program simultaneously influenced their hierarchical and systemic-thinking preferences. No significant differences were found between students…

The daily work of organising in schools both configures and is configured by the nature of schools as complex organisations. However, the organisational complexity of schools is often omitted in normative and analytical accounts of schools as organisations. In this paper, we seek to redress that omission and to bring organisational complexity to…

Through an ecological systems perspective, this study explores factors that influence successful academic achievement for African American males in at-risk settings. This qualitative study examines factors that contribute to the successful academic achievement for African American males from at-risk populations. The researchers explore African…

Higher education is under enormous pressure to transform itself and embrace a new paradigm. Operating under an outdated model that no longer aligns with the realities of modern society, institutions of higher education are recognizing the need to drastically remake themselves or possibly cease to exist. This article explores the current landscape…

We show how symmetries of a classical dynamical system can be described in terms of operators that act on the state space for the system. We illustrate our results by considering a number of possible symmetries that a classical dynamical system might have, and for each symmetry we give examples of dynamical systems that do and do not possess that…

In this short paper we discuss Mario Bunge's definition of system boundary. It is quickly discovered that Bunge's definition of system and system boundary are both deficient. We thus propose new definitions, which (hopefully) improve the situation. Our definition of system boundary works off the same intuition behind Bunge's.

Purpose: The purpose of this research is to make evident the inadequateness of concepts and language based on industrial knowledge still used in current practices by managers to cope with problems of the post-industrial societies characterised by non-linear process of emergence and acquisition of properties. The purpose is to allow management to…

Purpose: The purpose of this article is to expound the view that knowledge of a special kind, which the author terms open knowledge, has a central place in the conduct of human activities at the global level. Design/methodology/approach: The author advances the concept of open knowledge in a global context by examining key constructs in the field,…

This paper focuses on the conceptual model of an academic course inspired by complexity theory. In the proposed conceptual model, the aim of teaching is to form a learning organization: a knowledge community with emergent properties that cannot be reduced to any linear combination of the properties of its parts. In this approach, the learning of…

This paper responds to "Exploring the dynamism between propositional complexity and error rate: a case study" (EJ1176705) by Jordan Van Horn (this issue). In her study, Jordan Van Horn analyzes asynchronous email exchanges between a native and nonnative speaker of English utilizing three methods of analysis: error analysis, complexity…

To best support all students' academic, behavioral, and social needs, an integrated systems approach is necessary. In such systems, all faculty and staff ideally recognize student success is a shared responsibility and collaborate in a data-informed process to define common student behavioral expectations to facilitate success academically,…

The past decade has seen increasing interest from U.S. policymakers and think tanks in looking across countries for educational reform strategies. At the same time, due to differences across content and culture, many researchers are skeptical of this practice of 'policy-borrowing.' This research examines the emergence of a new form,…