Group items tagged

"leadership requires a vision. Without a vision to challenge followers with, there's no possibility of a principal being a leader"

The relationship between the teachers' and administrators' vision is important.

Administrators' vision tends to encompass the whole system or as described by Manasse (1986) their vision is an organizational vision. Teachers' vision appear to focus primarily on the individual or personal actions for school change

vision is "based on personal or personalized professional values"

"visionary leadership demands a clear sense of personal and organizational values"

The first value Aplin identified was that the instructional programs were "the highest priority of the system and decisions were assessed as to whether they enhanced or threatened it"

The second value this superintendent had was "equity in person relationships and instructional decisions

"Practices of delegation, teaming, flexibility of process and incremental planning with extensive communication" (p. 11) was the third valu

"The fourth value held was the need to retain a high level of local control

.The fifth value disclosed was his belief that the quality of decision is improved if there has been free and honest disclosure among interested parties"

"the specific value that each superintendent seemed to exemplify was simply 'the children come first'"

This loyalty includes a keen understanding of the community's values as well as consistent participation in community activities.

while there was little difference between the activities of effective and ineffective principals, the meanings they attributed to their activities were significantly different.

They found that personal background factors, such as type of education, and organizational factors, such as school size, were more important than values.

"Principals in the high-SES effective schools expected an academic emphasis and task orientations in classrooms but encouraged teachers to implement a broad curriculum. Their counterparts in the low-SES effective schools implemented a more narrowly defined curriculum and allocated more time for basic skill instruction"

"The primary rewards for most teachers come from students' academic accomplishments -- from feeling certain about their own capacity to affect student development"

Hallinger and Murphy (1986) reported that even when the low wealth schools were achieving, teachers' expectations were lower than those for students at wealthier schools; they believed they had minimal parental support and therefore assigned less homework and stressed the basic curriculum.

Differences in curricular and instructional practices suggest that the manner in which staff implement curriculum and instruction is filtered through their perceptions, beliefs and expectations concerning student ability and community background

Effective superintendents believe that students come first; effective principals believe in meeting the instructional needs of the students. Teachers value working with students and believe that they have an impact on their achievement. They have the shared belief that students' learning is of primary importance. The literature revealed that these individuals' also shared a common value. They valued the human resources -- the contributions, talents, and efforts -- of others in their organization.

principals more accountable

Data on Teachers Uneven

use their data to help struggling teachers and to reward successful ones

but the information is used in principals' evaluations of their teachers

While it's useful to have that kind of longitudinal data [for policy purposes]," he says, "one should not impute conclusions about the true depth of a child's intellectual development in terms of math, science, or whatever."

results on statewide tests aren't as useful as many policymakers think.

Students take the tests at the start of every quarter in every subject, and the results are available the same day. The data are broken down by the racial, ethnic, economic, and other subgroups used in NCLB accountability reports.

These two reasons, technocentrism and pedagogical dogmatism, Harris argues, explain why for decades, enthusiastic policymakers, researchers, and practitioners have confused technology integration (involving  the perennial conflict of content vs. skills) with technology as an instrument for pedagogical reform (moving from teacher-centered to learner-centered instruction).

Since most technology designers do not understand effective teaching (or are not designing something for teaching purposes), they often focus on making content more appealing or easier to access instead of creating a technology that causes students to more deeply engage mentally with content.

When I did my doctoral research, I found that just bringing in technology and showing teachers how it worked did not change pedagogy. I believe that if you want to change pedagogy to a more constructivist approach, you need to tackle this head on and not make it part of some technology project.