Effective-schools research has determined that successful schools are invariably led by a principal who is recognized as an instructional leader. This paper synthesizes and attempts to clarify the most recent perspectives on instructional leadership. Data sources included professional educational journals, trade books on leadership, and…

Mentoring programs offer new teachers and providers a practical and supportive way to learn and grow on the job. For experienced teachers and providers, mentoring programs create an opportunity to remain in the field and advance in their profession. This guide is one part of the Early Childhood Mentoring Curriculum designed by the National Center…

School restructuring is dependent upon teacher professionalism, and teacher professionalism necessitates the development of collegial behaviors. This paper briefly describes an ongoing study of collegiality in an elementary collegial teacher preparation program. Subjects were student teachers who were paired for a two-semester student teaching…

Influenced by leadership developments in the private sector, educational researchers have increasingly focused their attention on "transformational" models of leadership that emphasize collaboration and empowerment. The facilitative leader's role is to foster the involvement of employees at all different levels. This digest summarizes…

The Internet is an international network linking hundreds of smaller computer networks in North America, Europe, and Asia. Using the Internet, computer users can connect to a variety of computers with little effort or expense. The potential for use by college faculty is enormous. The largest problem faced by most users is understanding what such…

Marin City Families First (MCFF) is an intervention program providing intensive home-based support and services to at-risk families, through family advocates, to help them stabilize their lives and increase their ability to provide safe, healthy environments for their children. Comprised of case studies of three MCFF families and their family…

Written for child care center directors, this book offers a framework for thinking about and organizing the director's work along with principles and strategies to cultivate the kind of thinking and activities that support a vision of early childhood programs as learning communities. Chapter 1, "Guiding Your Program with a Vision," offers a vision…

This brief report summarizes a longer document with the same title. It reviews how college faculty are increasingly collaborating to do much of their work. It notes that the two principal forms of collaboration, teaching and research, are often distinctive arrangements depending on the field of study, institutional environment, and task…

The three reports combined here examine a workshop/seminar consultancy program for college faculty on the dynamics of course teams and group process in course development. The consultancy program focused on the hidden influences of groups and the relationship between individual and institutional change. These three reports: (1) examine the…

This book contains information targeted at executives, line managers, and human resource executives responsible for bringing the team vision to their organizations. A prologue defines teams and shows how they are developed. Part I (chapters 1-4) has the following purposes: introduces the team empowerment continuum, shows how a reshuffling of…

The University of Alberta (Canada) has developed a range of collaborative relationships in its teacher preparation program. Over 5 years, the faculty developed collaborative relationships in five categories: (1) meta-collaboration to promote and study collaboration; (2) university students in regular classrooms during curriculum and instruction…

A case study was undertaken of a student teaching situation in which the operational behavior styles of the student and the cooperating teacher were quite different. According to the tool used for the study (Gregorc style delineator: A self-assessment instrument), the student teacher tested high in random style categories while the cooperating…

After emphasizing the need for a system for evaluating professional support personnel (i.e., counselors, school psychologists, social workers, school nurses, deans of students, librarians, work-study supervisors, directors of curriculum, content specialists) and reviewing the past and present nature of evaluation in education, this document…

Issues concerning mentoring for women in higher education are discussed. After identifying benefits of mentoring for the protege, the mentor, and the institution, barriers to traditional mentoring for women are considered. Attention is directed to why men may hesitate to mentor women students and faculty, why female mentors are hard to find on…

Adversarial collective bargaining often leads to lingering resentments. Collaborative bargaining, conversely, is a problem-solving approach to contract negotiations based on common interests and mutual respect. Recognizing the interrelationship between trust at schools and trust at the bargaining table, a growing number of school districts are…