Negotiating authority, a multifaceted, on-going process of mutual bargaining over the power to determine or the right to control, permeates all facets of teaching experience. Considered by many educational theorists to be an outgrowth of collaborative dialogue and decision-making that helps foster active student engagement and investment in…

This paper reports on the findings of a research project which explored the value for secondary school teachers of consulting with pupils about the curriculum. Twenty volunteer teachers across a range of subject areas in an 11-18 and three 11-16 secondary schools in a city in the East Midlands of England were given an open-ended remit to…

Previous studies of the relationship between employee participation in decision making and job satisfaction have conceptualized degree of participation as the number of decisions one influences (scope). To explore another dimension of participation--degree of influence--a model was used which emphasizes the balance between how much influence…

Discusses how the budgeting process at universities can be improved by applying certain principles: involve people whose authority derives from responsible expertise, understand human decision-making risks and guard against them, address questions of long-term importance to the institution, and structure positive budget incentives for all levels…

Uses sample of 99 elementary principals in Israel to examine simultaneously 5 dimensions of participative management: decision domain, degree of participation, structure, target of participation, and rationale. Finds, for example, that principals tend to involve teachers more in the technical domain than the managerial domain. (Contains 76…

States that the virtues of participative management have been promoted enthusiastically in recent years, but the realities of politics and power enable few to practice it consistently. Includes precautions and guidelines. (JOW)

With a predetermined agenda, real engagement cannot occur, even if stakeholders help shape the substance of some components. Gaining public and professional support depends on developing engagement strategies (assessing needs, reporting results, and establishing strategic direction) that embody fundamental principles, such as reciprocity,…

Conspectus tools are used to gather collection data for a variety of reasons. Criticisms of the instruments are equally varied. Conspectus users frequently express uncertainty about the accuracy and validity of judgments about collections based on conspectus evaluations. An overview of decision-making research demonstrates that uncertainty is…

In this article, the author found himself particularly drawn to a book he received in the mail--"Stewardship: Choosing Service Over Self-Interest" by Peter Block. Although the dictionary definition of steward is "one who manages another's property, finances or other affairs," from his vantage point as the first African-American superintendent in…

The Council of Chief State School Officers' "Accommodations Manual: How to Select, Administer, and Evaluate the Use of Accommodations for Instruction and Assessment of Students with Disabilities" was first developed to establish guidelines for states to use for the selection, administration, and evaluation of accommodations for…

It's near-impossible to think about course management systems (CMS) without thinking about innovation, collaboration, and the sharing of ideas across institutions and even from vendor to vendor. Yet, "the next step" in CMS now means distinctly different things to various colleges and universities as, going forward, they consider their…

Notions of distributed leadership and professional learning communities are bedfellows in the drive to school improvement. However, these ideas of sharing leadership and mutual learning as a community are not introduced and developed in a neutral context. Power relationships, priorities and purposes are constructed in certain ways within the…

In this study, we inquired about patterns of leadership distribution, as well as which leadership functions were performed by whom, the characteristics of nonadministrative leaders, and the factors promoting and inhibiting the distribution of leadership functions. We consider our account of distributed leadership in this district to be a probable…

Objective: To summarize existing research on individual numeracy and methods for presenting risk information to patients. Methods: We selectively retrieved articles from MEDLINE and the "Social Sciences Citation Index". Results: Many Americans have low numeracy skills, a deficit that impedes effective health care. Approaches to risk communication…

In many European mountain areas, including the Swiss Alps, agriculture has been on the decline in the last decades. This has led to changes in land use, landscape and biodiversity; changes which are perceived, explained and valued by people in different ways. In this paper, the views of local stakeholders in the Surses valley, Switzerland…