Increasing attention to mentoring in the teaching profession in recent years has been accompanied by a proliferation of programs, literature and expertise related to experienced teachers helping new teachers. To assess the extent to which there is a common set of functions performed by teacher mentors, a two-phase study of mentoring was…

As school districts move toward collaborative school improvement, reform leaders recognize that most school personnel have had little training or experience working within schools on organized decision making teams. Teachers and staff members are being required to negotiate with each other in the process of making organizational decisions--a new…

Designed to help those who develop and implement formal mentoring programs find relevant information, this publication summarizes 80 books and articles selected from the practical and academic literature. Section 1 is an annotated bibliography of the 80 works representative of the available published literature on formal mentoring programs within…

Many school districts and schools find that they have an incomplete understanding of site-based management (SBM). This guidebook provides a systemwide approach to site-based management, using SBM as a strategy for school improvement and increased student success rather than for managing the status quo. It identifies nine essential perspectives and…

Although experiential education is really the oldest approach to learning, its practitioners have not had an easy time justifying its relevance in the modern educational world. Recent changes in the methodologies of evaluation have provided useful tools for experiential educators. Such tools can be used to refine programming, enhance student…

Effective organizational communication can greatly enhance the quality of the school environment and professional/personal relationships. This book focuses on successful communication skills that can help make the school environment a productive experience for administrators, school staff, students, and parents. Chapter 1 discusses the importance…

School librarians are educators no less than teachers and administrators, and their roles grow ever more important. In most schools, however, there is a gap between the ideal influential role of the school librarian and the actual role of the practicing librarian. The book addresses overcoming this gap for secondary school librarians, not from the…

By state law, many educators are being forced to move from a traditional norm of autonomy to one of collaboration. This paper presents findings of a study that identified the changing role of the 21st century superintendent and described the way one female superintendent promoted state-mandated collaboration in a rural school district with very…

Mentoring programs designed to assist beginning teachers have become commonplace in today's public school. However, little has been voiced about the necessity of considering the self-esteem of the mentor and the part it plays in developing a sucessful mentor/beginning teacher relationship. The mentor's self-concept directly affects the teaching…

The mentoring model described in this paper assumes teachers to be self-directing professionals, and adopts the formalized mentor-protege relationship as the starting point and the individual teacher's professional development as the organizing principle for the induction of teachers into the profession. The essential elements of a mentor's…

This paper describes the development and implementation of a collaborative, interdisciplinary curriculum program, the Quest program. Implemented at a suburban New England high school, the program was loosely based on the tenets of the Coalition of Essential Schools. Ethnographical methodology included document analysis, participant observation,…

This paper presents findings of case studies that applied social exchange theory to examine the instructional leadership roles of four exemplary high school department chairs. Data were gathered at four suburban high schools in a large metropolitan area of the midwestern United States using the methods of observation and interviews with the…

This guide for doctoral students (especially those from minority groups) and their mentors examines the alliance between the doctoral student and his major professor (dissertation advisor). Mentoring is examined as an element of the doctoral process, including discussion of the roles of the mentor/protege in the alliance, the choosing of a mentor,…

Noting a recent trend in scholarship of using narratives to warn teachers of the possible dangers of un-theorized and uncritical utilization of technology in the writing classroom, this paper offers a story that does not involve students, anonymous messages, or private files that inadvertently become public, but instead concerns a series of…

Focusing on the staff development process, a study examined the use of research in teaching reading comprehension by six teachers at two Tucson, Arizona middle schools. The schools employed both individual and group staff development, but while one school was considered to have a positive school culture, the other school was predicted to have a…