Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to offer a theoretical contribution to explicate the various factors and aspects that influence Senge's five disciplines and their outcomes. Design/methodology/approach: The paper develops a conceptual framework for the analysis of antecedents and outcomes of Senge's five disciplines, and offers moderators to…

Until this year, the Oregon Department of Education ran a central portal of thousands of learning resources that required all teachers and students to have an email address as authentication for security purposes. Because many districts didn't offer student email, the learning materials were not available to everyone. In April, Oregon became the…

This article describes a departmental initiative designed to integrate the teaching of graduate and undergraduate sociology through research methodology and the completion of actual research projects. The goal was to develop a multilevel team approach within which faculty, graduate students, and undergraduates would view their work as part of a…

Many counselors lack a clear understanding of the phenomenon of self-injury. This article presents results of a qualitative study examining the experiences of young adult women who engage in self-injurious behaviors. Interpretation of the participants' narrative data offers insight into the value of a humanistic approach to counseling this…

How do external visual representations (e.g., graph, diagram) promote or constrain students' ability to identify system components and their interrelations, to reinforce a systemic view through the application of the STS approach? University students (N = 150) received information cards describing cellphones' communication system and its subsystem…

Reviewing relevant policy, this article argues that the current "integration interlude" is concerned with reformation of work relations to create new forms of "social capital". The conceptual framework of social capital has been used by government policy-makers and academic researchers to examine different types, configurations…

Based on Bronfenbrenner's ecological systems theory, this qualitative study examined the impact of home visits on a group of six Head Start educators. Each participant conducted two home visits. For the first home visit, participants were not provided any guidance. On the second visit, participants were provided a handout with questions intended…

This article reflects lessons learned from work with thousands of educators from all types of K-12 schools. While recognizing that there is no schooling-for-sustainability blueprint that fits all schools, the Center for Ecoliteracy--www.ecoliteracy.org--in Berkeley, California, has articulated a set of precepts that it calls "Smart by…

Increasingly, schools have been adopting comprehensive, three-tiered response to intervention (RTI) systems to support students in both academics and social behavior. But with each new systems change initiative comes separate teams, data, and training and coaching systems. Given the intensity of resources required to implement and sustain such…

A case-study approach to teaching electronics system design that has been used since 2004 to demonstrate the importance of both nontransferable and transferable design issues to first-year undergraduate students is described. The student cohort of relevance to this work represents a diverse group comprising both students studying for a four-year…

In this article we develop the arguments of Glatter on the importance of adopting a more "organisation-oriented" approach to educational leadership development. Through a critical review of current publications and national courses in the field, we argue that educational leadership is still very skills focussed at the expense of more sophisticated…

This study examines the interactions between problem solving and conceptual change in an elementary science class where students build system dynamic models as a form of problem representations. Through mostly qualitative findings, we illustrate the interplay of three emerging intervening conditions (epistemological belief, structural knowledge…

The costs for providing medical school education and services in Vietnam's universities continue to increase. Through a collaborative project between the Government of the Netherlands and Vietnam's Ministry of Health, a five year experimental program to develop in-country capacity and reduce the dependence upon a foreign medical service delivery…

The purpose of this research project was to explore how Black students perceive the reasons for the low enrolment of Black students in the Foundation Phase teacher education and training programmes at universities. Focus groups and follow up small group interviews were conducted to explore the reasons why Black students choose Foundation Phase and…

In 2002 President Martin Jischke initiated a new era in strategic planning at Purdue. Under his leadership, strategic planning became a centralized activity with unit plans aligned to the university plan. Strategic goals were designed to have maximum impact, which would be measurable through metrics. Strategic planning at Purdue would be an…