Is your school a good, healthy place to work? Does the organizational climate contribute to academic achievement? Do you know how to evaluate the factors that can directly affect the effectiveness of education? Open Schools//Healthy Schools offers the basis for answering these and other questions. The authors demonstrate the significant relationship that exists between school health and academic performance. They then present the measures, developed over many years of careful research, that can best test the organizational climate of any school.
Emotion management is an important source of social capital and synergy for organizations. Managers have a great role in the creation of this synergy. A manager who can cope with their emotions indirectly contributes to organizational effectiveness. This situation is especially important in human-oriented organizations providing services rather than goods, such as educational institutions. Leadership is a process of social influence, which maximizes the efforts of others towards the achievement of a goal. Leadership stems from social influence rather than authority or power. In terms of system approach, the input, output, process, and feedback of educational organizations are always related to human behaviors. Therefore, organizations must address the nature of human beings in all of their managerial processes. Although organizations, in which people are at the foreground, try to continue their functioning on a rational and formal basis throughout the managerial process, they sometimes have to manage emotional and informal phenomena. In this case, there is a need for managers and school leaders who can shape the rationale in line with the requirements of human nature. What is expected from this administrator is that they do not ignore human needs and emotions while providing the management of educational institutions. For this reason, these managers should be "leaders" rather than "executives" who only work in a formal framework of organization management. Moreover, principals and teachers should also be leaders in all educational processes. Emotions are the main catalyst of positive organizational culture. Leaders can create an effective organizational culture with the main source of positive emotions between employers. Positive emotions also motivate employees for organizational purposes. If a leader wishes to create and maintain an effective organizational culture, it is essential to support positive behavior and emotional climate in their institutes and schools. Leaders-school-managers and teachers, therefore, need to develop emotion management abilities. Educational organizations need to shape their organizational culture, climate, and psychology to support their leaders in efficiently managing their employees’ emotions. Up to now, this topic has been usually addressed as the main catalyst and a sub-dimension of emotional intelligence. Moreover, current evidence classifies social and empathy skills as other sub-dimensions of emotional intelligence. For this reason, this collection of peer-reviewed articles will draw attention to the contemporary term "emotional management" and contribute to educational fields by means of exploring the relationship between emotions and leadership.
Since its first publication in 1959, The Nongraded Elementary School has become a classic in school reform literature. This reissue includes a retrospective introduction on what happened to nongraded alternatives in the aftermath of “Sputnik” educational reforms, what is occurring amid the current resurgence of school reform, and what the prospects are for the future. The value of this book lies in its still contemporary theoretical underpinnings for the nongraded school. The book’s treatment of the issue of promotion versus non-promotion is of particular interest in the current debate on school reform.
Like a strong foundation in a house, the climate of a school is the foundation that supports the structures of teaching and learning. This book provides a framework for educators to look at school and classroom climates using both informal and formal measures. Each chapter focuses on a different aspect of climate and details techniques which may be used by heads or classroom teachers to judge the health of their learning environment. The book sets out to enhance understanding of the components of a healthy learning environment and the tools needed to improve that environment. It also looks at ways to assess the impact of change activities in improving and sustaining educational excellence. The international team of contributors bring perspectives from the school systems in America, UK, Australia and Holland.
Your school is a lot more than a center of student learning--it also represents a self-contained culture, with traditions and expectations that reflect its unique mission and demographics. In this groundbreaking book, education experts Steve Gruenert and Todd Whitaker offer tools, strategies, and advice for defining, assessing, and ultimately transforming your school's culture into one that is positive, forward-looking, and actively working to enrich students’ lives. Drawing from decades of research on organizational cultures and school leadership, the authors provide everything you need to optimize both the culture and climate of your school, including * "Culture-busting" strategies to help teachers adopt positive attitudes, outlooks, and behaviors; * A framework for pinpointing the type of culture you have, the type that you want, and the actions you need to take to bridge the two; * Tips for hiring, training, and retaining teachers who will actively work to improve your school's culture; and * Instructions on how to create and implement a successful School Culture Rewiring Team. Though often invisible to the naked eye, a school's culture influences everything that takes place under its roof. Whether your school is urban or rural, prosperous or struggling, School Culture Rewired is the ultimate guide to making sure that the culture in your school is guided first and foremost by what's best for your students.
One civil rights-era law has reshaped American society—and contributed to the country's ongoing culture wars Few laws have had such far-reaching impact as Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972. Intended to give girls and women greater access to sports programs and other courses of study in schools and colleges, the law has since been used by judges and agencies to expand a wide range of antidiscrimination policies—most recently the Obama administration’s 2016 mandates on sexual harassment and transgender rights. In this comprehensive review of how Title IX has been implemented, Boston College political science professor R. Shep Melnick analyzes how interpretations of "equal educational opportunity" have changed over the years. In terms accessible to non-lawyers, Melnick examines how Title IX has become a central part of legal and political campaigns to correct gender stereotypes, not only in academic settings but in society at large. Title IX thus has become a major factor in America's culture wars—and almost certainly will remain so for years to come.
Physical inactivity is a key determinant of health across the lifespan. A lack of activity increases the risk of heart disease, colon and breast cancer, diabetes mellitus, hypertension, osteoporosis, anxiety and depression and others diseases. Emerging literature has suggested that in terms of mortality, the global population health burden of physical inactivity approaches that of cigarette smoking. The prevalence and substantial disease risk associated with physical inactivity has been described as a pandemic. The prevalence, health impact, and evidence of changeability all have resulted in calls for action to increase physical activity across the lifespan. In response to the need to find ways to make physical activity a health priority for youth, the Institute of Medicine's Committee on Physical Activity and Physical Education in the School Environment was formed. Its purpose was to review the current status of physical activity and physical education in the school environment, including before, during, and after school, and examine the influences of physical activity and physical education on the short and long term physical, cognitive and brain, and psychosocial health and development of children and adolescents. Educating the Student Body makes recommendations about approaches for strengthening and improving programs and policies for physical activity and physical education in the school environment. This report lays out a set of guiding principles to guide its work on these tasks. These included: recognizing the benefits of instilling life-long physical activity habits in children; the value of using systems thinking in improving physical activity and physical education in the school environment; the recognition of current disparities in opportunities and the need to achieve equity in physical activity and physical education; the importance of considering all types of school environments; the need to take into consideration the diversity of students as recommendations are developed. This report will be of interest to local and national policymakers, school officials, teachers, and the education community, researchers, professional organizations, and parents interested in physical activity, physical education, and health for school-aged children and adolescents.
This book demonstrates how the school principal’s consideration of culture and climate of the school can significantly improve and sustain student achievement over time. Highlighting an innovative approach to organizational health and student achievement, this volume uses inferential statistical data analysis to quantify the way school leaders can strategically interact within school culture and systems to improve student achievement. A cutting-edge analysis of the importance of school climate, this book draws on current research from the Organizational Health Inventory diagnostic framework to provide data-based conceptual models of the relation between culture and leadership.
This new book recognizes the reality that all principals are responsible for supervision, evaluation, and professional development of their teachers—tasks that are neither simple nor without conflict. The primary audience of this text is aspiring and practicing principals. We hope to help them understand both the theory and practice of supervision, evaluation, and professional development. Observing instruction, collection data for reflection, and having conversations about teaching however, are not sole provinces of principals. Master teachers, teacher leaders, and teacher colleagues can also benefit from the Supervisory sections of the book, especially the chapters on high-quality instruction, improving instruction, and the classroom data collecting tools.
In 1988, the Chicago public school system decentralized, granting parents and communities significant resources and authority to reform their schools in dramatic ways. To track the effects of this bold experiment, the authors of Organizing Schools for Improvement collected a wealth of data on elementary schools in Chicago. Over a seven-year period they identified one hundred elementary schools that had substantially improved—and one hundred that had not. What did the successful schools do to accelerate student learning? The authors of this illuminating book identify a comprehensive set of practices and conditions that were key factors for improvement, including school leadership, the professional capacity of the faculty and staff, and a student-centered learning climate. In addition, they analyze the impact of social dynamics, including crime, critically examining the inextricable link between schools and their communities. Putting their data onto a more human scale, they also chronicle the stories of two neighboring schools with very different trajectories. The lessons gleaned from this groundbreaking study will be invaluable for anyone involved with urban education.
