How do schools maintain momentum with change and enter new cycles of growth when they are attempting to do things differently? This article draws on a two-year evaluation of the "Positive Behaviour for Learning School-Wide" initiative to identify key factors that enabled schools to engage in a long-term and iterative change process.…

Across the country, districts are committing to observing, assessing, and giving feedback to teachers multiple times a year. Currently, school systems are dedicating an enormous amount of effort to accumulating data on teachers, but the field still has a lot to learn about how best to use data to support the improvement of teaching. This brief,…

Most executives have not heard of human performance technology (HPT), but a recent Google search showed 25 times more Google hits for "lean six sigma" than for "human performance technology." This article describes five factors that make HPT a hard sell: (1) HPT is not part of standard business jargon, (2) organizational executives associate…

Compares the common but unsuccessful management method of "management by crisis" to the principles and results of sound management practice, in an attempt to enable crisis managers to recognize and overcome their mistakes. (Author/JG)

This publication is intended to aid practicing educators in reviewing and utilizing current principles of problem-solving and decision-making. The booklet is organized in five short sections that briefly discuss different aspects of organizational problem-solving and outline suggested steps to guide educators in applying problem-solving techniques…

An annotated bibliography of 40 articles on participative decision making (PDM) published from 1968 through 1975 is presented. The following categories were used in summarizing each article: description, sample, type of study, variables, PDM variables, results and discussion. An introduction to the bibliography discusses some issues related to…

This paper discusses the financial crisis facing public education in the United States today and argues that the most effective response to this crisis is to improve the decision-making skills of educational administrators. Based on a review of the literature on administrative decision-making and organizational change, the author examines several…

Contemporary approaches to research and practice in the administration of organizational change tend to emphasize systematic aspects of the process, focusing on the orderly sequencing of such activities as goal-setting, planning, and execution. This emphasis has given rise to efforts to identify and describe overall strategies of organizational…

Appreciative inquiry (AI) is based on the heliotropic principle, which has been variously described as art and science, holistic theory and practice, and practical philosophy and change process. AI engages people and organizations in discovering what gives life to human systems when they are most effective and constructive and using that knowledge…