Innovation is difficult to define because a practice which is innovative on one campus may not be innovative elsewhere. Nevertheless, a possible definition might be "a practice which is worthy of emulation and has not yet been put into use by a significant number of colleges." Administrators should seek instructional innovation for several…

According to researchers Herriott and Gross in their book "The Dynamics of Planned Educational Change," educational innovations fail because administrators (1) fail to diagnose problems correctly, (2) fail to anticipate and resolve implementation problems, (3) adopt an "ad hoc" approach to educational innovation, (4) accept…

The core curriculum movement, as of 1981, is in crisis and apparently declining. Among the discouraging signs are the abandonment of core curriculum programs by many school districts and the conclusion of a long-time student of the core curriculum movement that the democratic goals of the core curriculum program conflict with the more autocratic…

Project "SPEED LEARN," a study which compared learning rates in beginning French and other behavior characteristics between adolescents with alpha training and comparable students without such training, was conducted with 62 rural subjects randomly divided into experimental and control groups. Both groups participated in an 8-week…

This paper discusses a major educational reform effort in Thailand and examines its development in the light of frameworks suggested by House and by Berman. Internal, or organizational, factors affecting the Thai educational system as well as factors affecting the external context, or environment, are considered. The educational reform had two…

Historical changes in the emphasis and focus of Project Head Start from 1965 to the present are briefly reviewed in this paper. Head Start was conceived of as primary prevention designed to enable children from lower income families to obtain educational prerequisites to formal schooling. The early years of the project were also characterized by…

Title III of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 and Title IV, Part C of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1974 provide for federal funding of innovative projects in public school districts. A study of 981 Illinois school districts revealed that between fiscal years 1974 and 1978 approximately 57 districts per year…

Innovation Configurations (IC) represent the operational patterns of the innovation that results from implementation by different individuals in different contexts. This manual is intended as a practical tool for assessing IC, to promote understanding and facilitating of the charge process. Various issues, questions, and tasks that must be…

Attempting to document the manner in which interventions are planned and executed in public schools, this case study presents a two-year Teacher Corps Project in which the faculty members of a junior high school were required to change their approach to discipline using Glasser's Reality Therapy approach. Employing the Concerns-Based Adoption…

The goal of this report is to describe the process by which new service practices in urban bureaucracies become routinized. The routinization process is studied by examining the life histories of six types of innovations: computer-assisted instruction; police computer systems; mobile intensive care units; closed circuit television systems; breath…

This report describes the National Diffusion/Adoption Network, who is involved with it (developer/demonstrators, state facilitators, state education agencies, the U.S. Office of Education, and local school districts), and what happened during the first year of its operaton. (DS)

The guide was designed to assist public school personnel in the delivery of educational services to young handicapped children by providing access to information on model programs, increasing knowledge of adopting or adapting educational innovations, suggesting pertinent questions to ask when considering a specific model, and recommending sources…

This paper addresses the question, "What potentialities lie in the use of 'informal networks' for the improvement of problem-solving in American public schools?" The first section consists of a close examination of the charge with consideration of networking and problem-solving capacity. In the second section, some of the constraints that affect…