American education is a vast junkyard of curricular innovations that in their own heydays were promoted as panaceas for much that ails the schools and society. It's not that good ideas and usable methods were lacking there. It's that they live in a culture where people expect too much, in too short a time, for too little an investment in…

This article explores the perceptions and reactions of school and law enforcement personnel in the successful resolution of armed hostage and barricade events in schools. A total of 12 individuals from three schools were interviewed to determine (1) their salient roles related to the situations, (2) facilitative systemic conditions, (3) to what…

Purpose: The purpose of this article is to explore strategies used by communities of practice (CoPs) managers when managing intentionally created CoPs. Design/methodology/approach: Four intentionally created CoPs in Ireland are explored, using a qualitative research design with data from observation, interviews and analysis of documents. Findings:…

The study of the legal culture of young people in the interaction between subjective factors and objective conditions characterizing the transformation of societies in the post-Soviet space makes it possible not only to assess the current state of that culture, but also to map out ways to improve it. In this article, the authors examine the…

Despite increased attention in professional development to building communities of teachers, few studies have investigated the development of trust in these communities. This paper presents issues related to trust in a professional development project at an elementary school. The project aimed for school-based elementary teachers and…

This report on a three-year study of the Social Well-Being in Mackay Schools (SWIMS) project includes a survey of the literature, a discussion of aspects of the program's implementation and examples of new and innovative means of successful interagency collaboration in educational and child protection contexts. These examples also highlight the…

In this study, 225 Jamaican university students were asked to recall their bullying experiences at elementary and high schools. Being verbally humiliated, robbed, and beaten were the top three frequently-occurring experiences. Acts of bullying by peers and educators were compared for their impact on students' psychological well being. Educator but…

This small-scale phenomenological interview study explored how seven poor, illiterate mothers in five different slum areas in a bigger city in the Punjab province of Pakistan, viewed the significance of education for their daughters with disabilities. The mothers' views were influenced by cultural aspects and behaviour patterns in the families'…

As the pressure on schools to meet higher and higher expectations with less and less resources increases, educators seek to explore school models which are centered on reforms that increased the likelihood of meeting this challenge. One reform initiative which has received much attention is the utilization of teacher leadership to improve school…

In late 2010, Chicago Public Schools (CPS) initiated a new safety program called the "Culture of Calm" initiative (CoC). Since 2010, CPS has focused resources on schools in order to improve school climate--particularly school safety. These resources were used, to a large extent, to hire vendors that provided services to teachers and…

Taking over a broken program can be one of the hardest tasks to take on. However, working towards a vision and a common goal--and eventually getting there--makes it all worth it in the end. In this article, the author shares the lessons she learned as the new director for the Bright Horizons Center in Ashburn, Virginia. She suggests that new…

Recent studies have suggested that educational leaders enacting a balance of technical and adaptive leadership have an effect on increasing student achievement. Technical leadership focuses on problem-solving or first-order changes within existing structures and paradigms. Adaptive leadership involves deep or second-order changes that alter…

The authors' goal was to model the role played by the relationship between a writing teacher and her students in the feedback and revision cycle they experienced in an English-as-a-foreign-language context. Participants included a nonnative teacher of English and 14 students enrolled in her English writing class in a Korean university. Data came…

Cognitive style has been regarded as one of the important variables to predict individual cognitive functioning. This paper describes an empirical study that examined the role of thinking styles in relation to students' online learning and teamwork performance. Two hundred and eight students in an online MBA (Master of Business Administration)…

The action learning set (ALS) is an often-used tool in practice development to facilitate group reflection. As such, its use evolves in the hands of the participants as they become more comfortable with the process and as trust develops amongst group members. This paper aims to discuss the journey of one ALS over a 2-year period. It seeks to…