The principle of lay people taking important strategic decisions and holding lead professionals to account has a long and illustrious pedigree in British public life; it applies to police authorities, primary care trusts, local councils as well as schools. However, influential voices have been raised over recent months about the suitability of…

Background: Teacher Participation in decision-making is one of the recommendations of school-based management and one of the key characteristics of an effective school. Although teacher participation in decision making is claimed to be correlated with their affective outcome, few researchers have been attempted to verify the predictive…

Many schools are organised into departments which function as contexts that frame teachers' professional experiences in important ways. Some educational systems have adopted distributed forms of leadership within schools that rely strongly on the departmental structure and on the role of the department coordinator as teacher leader. This paper…

This article aims to evaluate the effectiveness of the participative, democratic model of governance commonly found within social enterprises. This model has its origins in the broader not-for-profit sector where it is widely adopted. A core assumption of this governance form is that it ensures that the organisation will take a range of views into…

When former chef and food broker, Tony Geraci was invited by his district superintendent to review New Hampshire's largest school food service program, he never imagined that he would be responsible for running one of the nation's most successful sustainable food service programs. The CONVAL District sustainable food program, create by Geraci and…

The purpose of this study was to determine the most suitable ICT-based education and define the most suitable e-content creation tools for quantitative courses in the IT-management Masters program. ICT-based tools and technologies are divided in to three categories: the creation of e-content, the offering of e-content, and access to e-content. In…

The article addresses teacher retention challenges employers are experiencing in the quest to effectively meet standard human resource management practices. The quality of the employer-employee relationship forms the foundation upon which effective management practices thrive. Teachers who remain in education value students and their personal…

With the American School Counselor Association's (ASCA) adoption of the National Model, school counselors are called to align their work with educational reform initiatives and provide leadership in public schools (Dollarhide, 2003). School counseling literature supporting leadership for social justice is frequently reiterated (Hatch & Bowers,…

There have been many competent evaluations of youth civic engagement projects. Our work differs from those in assumptions, purposes, goals, methods, activities, and findings for use in evaluation capacity building and program improvement, theoretical and conceptual clarity, and decision-making. Typically, evaluations have focused on predetermined…

Unlike conventional models of software development, the open source model is based on the collaborative efforts of users who are also co-developers of the software. Interest in open source software has grown exponentially in recent years. A "Google" search for the phrase open source in early 2005 returned 28.8 million webpage hits, while…

Using a qualitative approach, I study two processes of intra-organizational cooperation and coordination--control and trust--in creative organizations. Specifically, I analyze the complex nature of trust-control relationships in Orpheus orchestra, the world's largest contemporary conductorless orchestra. I discuss how it rehearses and performs…

This study examines marital construction of family power among male-out-migrant couples in a Chinese village in Guangxi Province. In-depth interviews show that male-out-migrant couples prefer joint decision making. When couples are in disputes, power tends to go to the ones who shoulder greater household-based responsibilities; in this case, they…

A survey of 277 speech language pathologists (SLPs) investigated beliefs and practice regarding parents' involvement in service planning and delivery for children with speech impairment. Although the SLPs frequently involved parents in service delivery for speech intervention, parental involvement in service planning was less frequent. SLPs…

This research examines changes in decision-making styles as a result of participation in scenario planning. A quasi-experimental pretest-posttest design and several nonparametric tests were used to analyze data gathered from research participants in a technology firm in the Northeastern United States. Results show that participants tend to…

In this article, the author provides an overview of Second Life[trademark], or simply SL, which was developed at Linden Lab, a San Francisco-based corporation. SL is an online society within a threee-dimensional virtual world entirely built and owned by its residents, where they can explore, build, socialize and participate in their own economy.…