School districts and educator preparation programs are important partners in the professional learning ecosystem. Their strong relationships have long been lauded as the gold standard of preparing and retaining high-quality teachers, yet they have been slow to develop robust reciprocal relationships that can address intensifying challenges of…

Women in higher education institutions (HEIs) in East Africa and elsewhere face unique challenges in the workplace. These women need to be equipped with the right tools to succeed in both their professional and personal life while also lifting other women at multiple levels of society. This book delves into the mission and accomplishments of the…

Purpose: This paper aims to contribute to discussion around the need for improved models for change in a rapidly changing world. It also aims to provide insights for further discussion around how a Nordic management approach can relate to the need for new change ideas. Since Lewin proposed that change requires unfreezing, moving and refreezing,…

Luke Sumich is one of the founders of Ormiston Junior College in Auckland, New Zealand. In this interview, he describes how the school came into being and the philosophy behind its personalized approach to education. He explains the views of the students and their parents as well as the challenges and hurdles encountered since the inception of the…

This chapter provides an overview of community colleges in mainland China, addressing briefly the recent history of community college development, defining these institutions, detailing various models with examples, and discussing challenges faced by these institutions and recommendations for future development.

Embedding general education in the Chinese university education system is a considerably complex systemic project, and a lack of institutional arrangements beneficial to general education has always been a key barrier in implementation. Currently, the main institutional restricting factors for university general education include substantial…

This case study, framed within a school-university partnership, highlights the tensions inherent to employing design-based approaches for educational change. The case illustrates core tensions between an abductive, open-ended, design-based approach to change versus more traditional (deductive/inductive) approaches to managing change in schools.…

Decentralization is an effective approach for structuring campus learning and success centers. McShane & Von Glinow (2007) describe decentralization as "an organizational model where decision authority and power are dispersed among units rather than held by a single small group of administrators" (p. 237). A decentralized structure…

Leading institutional pedagogies and practices tend to approach increasing international student populations from a deficit-based model, which focuses on the adaptation, acculturation, and assimilation of international students to the dominant host culture. We believe a better approach to improve international and domestic students' interaction is…

Investing in community colleges is a central part of the Biden administration's education agenda, with the goal of strengthening America's middle class and opening the benefits of education to all Americans. CCRC has conducted 25 years of research on how community colleges can more effectively educate students and set them up to successfully…

Since the early 1990s, lifelong learning has become a major policy concern for the European Union, being seen as a means for enabling individuals to be more competitive in social and economic contexts that are continually changing. After a series of white papers and strategies in the field of lifelong learning, the EU launched the Lifelong…

Responding to an Illinois law that took effect in 2010, the Performance Evaluation Reform Act (PERA), Chicago Public Schools (CPS) created and implemented the REACH (Recognizing Educators Advancing Chicago's Students) educator evaluation and support system. REACH was piloted in 2012-13. It is still being implemented as of the 2019-20 school year,…

The higher education sector operates in an increasingly complex global environment that is placing it under considerable stress and resulting in widespread change to the operating context and leadership of higher education institutions. The outcome has been the increased likelihood of conflict between academics and senior leaders, presaging the…

Kenya is one of the countries whose teachers the UNESCO (2015) report cited as lacking curriculum support in the classroom. As is the case in many African countries, a large portion of teachers in Kenya enter the teaching profession when inadequately prepared, while those already in the field receive insufficient support in their professional…

There has been a proliferation of high school reform models and interventions over the past few decades aimed at improving the nation's high schools, including increasing graduation requirements, introducing technology to classrooms, grouping ninth-grade students into their own "academies," reorienting the curriculum toward particular…