This article focuses on how teachers worked to build a meaningful curriculum around changes to a neighborhood and school grounds in a precinct listed for urban renewal. Drawing on a long-term relationship with the principal and one teacher, the researchers planned and designed a collaborative project to involve children as active participants in…

The recent school reform movement of the 1980s and 1990s has been characterized by school-based management (SBM) initiatives and participatory decision-making arrangements. While much has been written about the need for teacher, parental and community involvement in school decision-making, the role of the student in these experiments has remained…

Supervision based on collaboration, participative decision making, and reflective practice is the hallmark of a viable school improvement program that is designed to promote teaching and learning. Action research has gradually emerged as an important form of instructional supervision to engage teachers in reflective practice about their teaching…

Flexibility and accountability are two levers for change that occupy an increasingly prominent place among federal strategies for educational improvement. In return for introducing higher academic standards and performance-based accountability systems, states and districts have been granted increasing flexibility over how they may use the funding…

Students are rarely given the opportunity of being decisionmakers in class, and when they are, they may feel unsure of how to organize their own learning. However, over time they come to appreciate the benefits of a more active engagement in learning English. In this paper, I describe a procedure based on Exploratory Practice (EP) for guiding…

Successful transition planning is a lifelong process in which the student, family members, friends, and professionals come together to develop and act upon a plan that will lead to a successful adult life. For this reason, transition planning has become a part of several federal laws. The most encompassing of these laws, the Individuals with…

Many kinds of educational reform, especially site-based management, have contributed to teacher empowerment. The success of these reforms, however, is contingent upon administrative leadership that is willing to share power. This paper describes the attitudes of teachers toward site-based management (SBM), with a focus on the effects of…

A checklist for critiquing participatory planning and evaluation projects is introduced. Under the legislative mandate of "Florida Blueprint 2000: A System of School Improvement and Accountability," Florida schools must reorganize before the year 2000 by involving and connecting stakeholders in improvement processes. Every public school…

This paper examines the effects that the adoption of school-based management (SBM) and subsequent efforts to generate curriculum and instructional reforms have on school staff members. Specifically, it explores the leadership behaviors exhibited by administrators, faculty, and staff in 17 elementary and secondary schools from eight locations.…

Successful implementation of school-based management (SBM) begins with effective principal leadership. This paper describes findings of a study that examined the principal's role in implementing school-based decision making. Ethnographic data were collected over a 3-year period in 4 elementary schools that implemented SBM. Methods included…

This study explored ways that nursery school staff work with parents, involve parents in evaluation, and improve the nursery experience for both parents and children. The process of assessing parents' and staff's views about all aspects of nursery life, and the use of these views to form the basis of an action plan, are described. The staff and…

This paper describes outcomes of a partnership between the Rochester City School District (New York) and the Kodak 21st Century Learning Challenge consulting program for improving school-based planning team (S-BPT) operations. The purpose of the school-based planning team is to involve the entire school community in improving school effectiveness.…

In a high performance work organization (HPWO), employee basic skills are just one of many components. HPWOs feature the following: they have flatter organizational structures, have work done by teams of highly skilled workers, and have a focus on quality, customer service, and continuous improvement. The collaborative approach to workplace…

Central to restructuring efforts in Australia was the establishment of school decision-making groups (SDMGs), which gave school staff and community representatives more autonomy over decisions concerning educational policy and school development. This paper presents findings of a study that examined the responses of three secondary schools to the…

Teachers in "good" schools often provide considerable input into curriculum decisions and other types of school policies. They are considered to be "empowered." This paper argues that the apparent empowerment of teachers in these situations is actually the opposite: In good schools superordinates do not empower teachers; instead, teachers empower…