A visit to Trail Wind Elementary School in Boise (Idaho) reveals the qualities that earned Debbie Toy Idaho's Distinguished Principal of the Year award: creative commitment to student needs, the ability to bring in outside resources, dedication to a school vision, community and parent participation, team building among staff, and participatory…

Explores a British secondary school's 8-year involvement with the Improving the Quality of Education for All reform initiative, comparing three leadership models. Transactional and transformational leadership models are limited in long-term improvement efforts. Leadership themes based on values, shared leadership contexts, and capacity creation…

Performance-driven high schools have organizational, management, and governance structures that communicate high expectations. Such schools create a results-oriented culture, strongly support staff development, build community services and "outside" supports for students, help parents support their children's academic progress, and…

Discusses how adolescents are defining their need for "safe spaces" in ways useful to the current policy debate about community safety. It reveals adolescent's greater interest in preserving public spaces and youth programs and offers new insights into the causes of youth crime. Reasons for cooperative efforts to define and explore…

Defining "democracy" and determining compatible education practice is critical to school success. This article examines four definitions and articulates a fifth definition advocating a participatory, community-oriented democracy achieved through school and classroom structures and activities. Educators should develop their own working definitions…

Investigated how school superintendents defined and used power. Interviews with 47 superintendents nationwide and two other people from each school district indicated that the more strictly superintendents' definitions adhered to power as coming from or with others (rather than power over others), the more capable they were as collaborative…

The Chesapeake (Virginia) Public Schools developed a strategic school-improvement plan with 178 recommendations representing certain goals: school safety, standards, effectiveness, efficiency, staff training, technology integration, community involvement, and facilities. The implementation process consisted of assigning responsibilities,…

Ideally, school leadership should be shared among staff. However, the extent of justifiable sharing in actual practice depends on diverse contexts and consequent risks for headteachers. Research on management teams at four British primary schools shows how principals variably shared leadership by setting parameters for teamwork. (Contains 42…

Trust is a significant factor in collective action. A composite case illustrates the value of trust as a critical element of effective teamwork in a self-managed school context. Trust depends on individuals' predilections, intensive communication and interaction patterns, team composition, guiding principles, and teammates' emotional bonding.…

Portrays authors' work as external change agents involved in numerous comprehensive, school-based reform efforts in the United States. Concerned with schools' micropolitics, focuses on efforts to develop democratic school cultures and on various issues (victimization, leadership, and authenticity) related to these schools' internal governance.…

Discusses strategies for inviting middle school students to participate in class planning and presenting of information, noting the payoffs of this student-centered approach in greater student investment in the curriculum and receptiveness to learning. Considers the value of allowing time for students to reflect on their learning processes. (JPB)

Current conceptualizations of (Canadian) community college leadership associate leadership with hierarchical organizational structures. Today's community college leaders must respond to external changes and their effects and solve actual problems that have damaged these institutions. Managerial teams offer a less hierarchical, more democratic…

Describes a study seeking to develop a theory of instructional leadership grounded in interview data from practicing administrators and their teachers. Effective elementary instructional leaders engaged in various strategies designed to balance power inequities in their school community. They exemplified the use of collaborative power based on…

Describes changes at Lake Labish Elementary in Salem, Oregon, resulting from the school's participation in the federal Comprehensive School Reform Demonstration program. Comprehensive reform streamlines every aspect of the school, from leadership, curriculum, and instruction to attitudes, resources, and parent involvement. The school's new reading…

Reports on the redesign of Pima Community College's (PCC) West Campus library/student center. States that the college made the redesign a participatory process, developing a master plan through a series of intensive multiple-day workshops that included faculty members, staff, students, and community members. Concludes that consistent participation…