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School-based teams are a core method for stakeholder collaboration and coordination. Although school teams are responsible for making numerous decisions, a limited number of measures exist ...

The South African education scene is characterised by principals who come from the apartheid era where they manage the school alone in an authoritarian manner. Old approaches to school management have changed because the society has also changed. There is a shift from top-down style of leadership to shared or distributed leadership which requires the empowerment of those in managerial positions in schools. The principal is expected to manage the school together with significant stakeholders. In this study attention was focused on the extent to which principals perform the duties of instructional leadership and how they empower the School Management Team (SMT) to execute instructional leadership. Additionally, the study aimed at finding out impediments that principals experience in the course of empowering the School Management team. The study used a quantitative method involving the use of a questionnaire. The study population consisted of 90 principals and deputy principals and 165 heads of department in Tshwane-West District. Data analysis consisted of descriptive and inferential statistics. The greatest challenge is the administrative workload experienced by principals. The study also found that rural principals perform the duties of instructional leadership more than the urban principals. Principals perform their duties well and this is good for the academic performance of learners. Key words: School management, instructional management, empowerment, culture of teaching and learning, teaching and learning.

This study investigated the mediating role of initiative climate on the relationship between distributed leadership and organizational resilience in schools. The study employed a cross-sectional design following quantitative methods. The sample consisted of 310 teachers recruited from different cities located in seven geographical regions of Turkey in 2020-2021 academic year using convenience sampling. Data were collected online (Google Forms) using the Distributed Leadership Inventory, Personal Initiative Scale, and Organizational Resilience Scale, all of which had acceptable validity and reliability. Participants “agreed” with initiative climate and organizational resilience in schools and school principals’ distributed leadership behaviors. There were positive correlations between the variables. The results showed that distributed leadership (leadership coherence and leadership functions) fosters initiative climate and organizational resilience in schools. Initiative climate also contributes to organizational resilience in schools. Lastly, it can be said that distributed leadership has a significant effect on schools’ resilience through initiative climate.

In the past decade, research-practice partnerships (RPPs) have grown in number and reputation. Stephanie Brown and Annie Allen describe the varied ways partnerships facilitate more sustained and productive relationships between researchers and practitioners. They share key findings from a comparative case study of three different types of RPPs focused on mathematics instructional improvement conducted by the National Center for Research in Policy and Practice (NCRPP) and make recommendations for how partnerships can build more authentic bridges between research and practice.

Despite the popularity of distributed leadership theory, the investigation of the micro-political aspects of such models have scarcely been explored, and insights on the cultural variety of distributed practices in schools are limited. The present study aimed to explore what micro-political aspects emerge in participative decision making in collectivist and individualist cultures. To this end, a multiple case study method was adopted, focusing on four Israeli public high schools. Schools were chosen to represent an ‘extreme’ case selection rationale: two non-religious urban schools representing individualist cases, and two communal schools in religious kibbutzim representing communal schools. The analysis shed light on three micro-political points of comparison between the prototypes of participative decision making in collectivist and individualist cultures related to control, actors, and stage crafting. The findings and implications are discussed.

Since the granting of Native American materials – excavated in archaeological projects sponsored by federal and state governments across the United States in the 20th century – to public repositories, museum professionals have sought to manage such collections with care. At the University of Missouri, students responding to the local mandate of NAGPRA advocated a public investigation into the issue of Native American collections repatriation in the early 1990s. Their activism in part transformed campus praxis in three ways, effecting ethical shared decision-making, appropriate public access, and policy-level leadership. This paper examines the primary sources generated by students, faculty, and local and national journalists to broadly comprehend how community members continue to address Native collections management and access in a public land-grant university setting.

Globally, policy implementation in the education system has been found to be a challenging area of development. The South African education system is no exception to the ineffective implementation of policies. For example, in South Africa, the progression policy was introduced by the Department of Education in 2013 for the purpose of minimising school drop-out rates. It was intended particularly for learners who had been retained for more than 4 years in a phase. However, progressed learners have been said to be contributing to the decline of Grade 12 national results in 2015 and 2016. We argue that due procedures in the implementation of this policy could have affected the performance of progressed learners, and in turn the overall matriculation results. A qualitative approach was followed and a descriptive case study design was adopted in the study reported on here. Data were collected through document analysis and semi-structured interviews from 2 secondary schools in the Dimamo circuit, Limpopo province. We found that the progression policy was not implemented according to the stipulations. Communication breakdown, negative teacher attitude, overcrowded classrooms, a lack of knowledge and support were found to be contributory factors in the ineffective implementation of the policy. Keywords: implementation; progression policy; secondary schools

Drawing on the information processing perspective, this study examines the effects of TMT participative decision-making and heterogeneity on management innovation. It finds that TMT participative decision-making and heterogeneity individual and jointly contribute to management innovation. In addition, the effect of TMT participative decision-making is positively moderated by firm age, whereas that of TMT heterogeneity is negatively moderated by firm age. This study offers insights into how TMTs matter to management innovation, enriching the knowledge of the antecedents of management innovation. It also represents one of the first attempts that introduce firm age as a contingency for the innovation implications of TMTs.

We investigated the effect of expertise on the wisdom of crowds. Participants completed 60 trials of a numerical estimation task, during which they saw 50–100 asterisks and were asked to estimate how many stars they had just seen. Experiment 1 established that both inner- and outer-crowd wisdom extended to our novel task: Single responses alone were less accurate than responses aggregated across a single participant (showing inner-crowd wisdom) and responses aggregated across different participants were even more accurate (showing outer-crowd wisdom). In Experiment 2, prior to beginning the critical trials, participants did 12 practice trials with feedback, which greatly increased their accuracy. There was a benefit of outer-crowd wisdom relative to a single estimate. There was no inner-crowd wisdom effect, however; with high accuracy came highly restricted variance, and aggregating insufficiently varying responses is not beneficial. Our data suggest that experts give almost the same answer every time they are asked and so they should consult the outer crowd rather than solicit multiple estimates from themselves.

With nationwide concerns about the declines in youth voting turnout across the United States, increased attention has focused on schools to promote civic education, a broad curricular approach aime...

There is widespread consensus that parental involvement in their children’s education contributes to the children’s success at school. However, it is also recognized that non-dominant populations, ...

University education partners have great potential to facilitate schools’ moving from a school led traditional approach for family involvement to an asset based, empowerment approach to partnership...

PurposeThe aim of this study was to understand the relationship between teacher leadership and collective teacher efficacy in Chinese upper secondary schools.Design/methodology/approachBased on survey answers from 1,074 upper secondary teachers in a Chinese city, path analysis was conducted to understand the relationship.FindingsThis study identified that a number of dimensions of teacher leadership (recognition, collegiality, participation and positive environment) had positive relationships with group competence. Meanwhile, the dimensions of developmental focus, participation and positive environment had positive relationships with task analysis. Additionally, when the authors treated collective efficacy as a single variable, the dimensions of developmental focus, congeniality, participation and positive environment had positive relationships with collective efficacy.Originality/valueThis study is to understand the relationship between teacher leadership and collective teacher efficacy in a collective culture and hierarchical education system.

Purpose: This exploratory study investigates the relationship between teachers’ perceptions of professional learning communities (PLCs) and their differentiated instruction (DI) practice in a Hong Kong primary education context. Design/Approach/Methods: Three subsidized primary schools participated in the study. A total of 121 teachers completed surveys regarding their perceptions of PLC engagement and DI practice. Findings: Using principal component analysis, three dimensions of PLC engagement were identified: student learning, reflective dialogue, and shared and supportive leadership. Two distinctive PLC engagement profiles were generated based on cluster analysis: high PLC engagement and low PLC engagement. Teachers’ PLC engagement profiles were correlated with their DI practices. Originality/Value: The findings have implications for fostering teacher engagement in PLCs. Increased teacher participation in PLCs has great potential for promoting the use of DI.

Purpose: The purpose was to investigate the relationship between servant leadership and teachers' organizational citizenship behavior with mediating role of psychological empowerment. Research Methods: This study was an applied and correlation research method based on structural equation modeling. 281 teachers of Zahedan city were studied by stratified random sampling method. To collect information, three questionnaires were used: servant leadership (Gholipur et al., 2009), organizational citizenship behavior (Podsakoff & MacKenzie, 1990) and psychological empowerment (Spreitzer, 1995). For data analysis the Pearson correlation coefficient and structural equation modeling were used.Findings: The amount of correlation coefficient of servant leadership with psychological empowerment (r=0.616, p

The Every Child Succeeds Act of 2015 signaled a shift toward the recognition of the importance of school leadership, reflecting a growing body of literature that demonstrates principals are second only to classroom instruction in supporting student success. This influence is the greatest when principals focus on teaching and learning, or instructional leadership. The ability to focus on instructional leadership requires knowledge, as well as the schema that creates mental models for instructional leadership tasks. This study draws on interviews with principals to examine the relationship between their theory of leadership, which are conceptualized as leadership schema, and their instructional leadership practices. The findings suggest that there are similarities in the instructional leadership tasks undertaken by principals, but that how they engage in tasks is partially determined by their theory of leadership.

In order to optimize a needs analysis for digital infrastructure in the Digital Humanities, participatory development concepts are presented and compared with regard to their potential suitability....

The psychologist’s work in education is a field permanently under construction, crossed by multiple tensions. Some tensions are macrosocial, where the design of educational policy obliges us to stu...

Service users and carers’ (SUACs) inclusion in student selection days at English universities is accepted as standard practice, since such inclusion is mandated by a range of professional health an...

The purpose of this study is to explore Chinese faculty’ participation in university governance arrangements based on solid empirical data. This study found that the Chinese faculty’s participation...

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to explore development and validation of an empowering leadership instrument for salespeople. Design/methodology/approach In all, 20 items were developed for an empowering leadership instrument based on published research, concepts and theories. The instrument was applied as a cross-sectional study for salespeople working in small and medium enterprises. The collected data were assessed using exploratory factor analysis and confirmatory factor analysis to ascertain construct validity. Findings The instrument established excellent reliability at 0.904. Five factors such as “Showing concern and developing strong relationships with members”, “informing”, “coaching”, “participative decision making” and “leading by example” were extracted and validated from the exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis. Originality/value The validity of this questionnaire will facilitate future research to extend the boundaries of empowering leadership measurement in the context of supervision and management in organisations. This instrument will assist researchers to gain a more comprehensive understanding of empowering leadership and further investigate its potential in future studies.

Empowerment is often considered to be a central goal in outdoor education and environmental education. To develop student empowerment, a frequent recommendation is for the leaders of outdoor enviro...

The South African Schools Act, 84 of 1996, articulates the establishment of School Governing Bodies, which authorises stakeholders such as parents, educators and learners to participate actively in decision-making processes pertaining to school governance. The Act further stipulates that learners, through the Representative Council of Learners, should be afforded full opportunity to participate in crucial decisions by the broader governing body. The reason for undertaking the study reported on here was triggered by the concern raised by various authors about the high level of ineffectiveness of learners as governors of schools in South Africa. This study explored and analysed the significance of culture in relation to learners’ effectiveness as governors of schools in rural South Africa. A qualitative research approach, based on a purposive sampling method and interviews, was espoused by engaging members of the Representative Council of Learners in certain selected high schools of the Harry Gwala district in KwaZulu-Natal. The findings of the empirical study investigation divulged that culture was one of the main impediments to learners’ effective school governance in the rural South African setting. The study recommends the intervention of the Department of Education, with the view of creating an environment conducive to active learner participation in school governance in rural areas. Keywords: representative council of learners; rural areas; school governance; school governing bodies; South African Schools Act

The purpose of this study is to identify different types of school leadership as perceived by teachers and to test the extent that these types predict teacher retention. School leadership varies by perception, context, and may influence a teacher’s decision to leave their current school or the profession. Four statistically different types of leadership were found using teachers’ perceptions of principal and shared leadership behaviors. Teachers who perceived less principal leadership were more likely to leave their school. Teachers who reported more frequent principal and shared leadership were more likely to stay in their current school the following year.

In an article written for The Clearing House in 1974 titled, “Alternative schools: Can they survive?”, Gerald Brunetti described features of schools that served as an alternative to mainstream publ...

The premise of this article is that studies of distributed leadership could benefit from further incorporation of institutional approaches to better understand complex reform demands facing school ...

This fictional case presents the challenges school districts face when developing a new curriculum. After the school board voted to create a global studies program at Northern High School, the social studies supervisor had the responsibility of designing and implementing the curriculum. With only a few months to implement the curriculum, the supervisor embraced an ambitious whole-school approach. This included bringing teachers together from different disciplines to draft a curriculum; investing in professional development; and encouraging participation of students, the school, and the community. This case presents issues and questions that may arise during the curriculum design and development process.

Using the evidence from teacher professional learning communities, we explore the ways in which students can collaborate and build their collective efficacy.

The authors share insights from interviews with a dozen innovative principals who have instilled a collaborative ethos that deepens learning, engages students, and supports the teaching staff.

This paper focuses on a deductive, participative, and iterative process for curricular revision at a public Midwestern university in the Merchandising and Fashion Design program. A systematic, nonlinear, organized process is presented and details specific components used in curricular review. The guiding framework for the redesign was that of Garner and Buckley (1988). That is, feedback was solicited and incorporated from educators, students, and employers. In each of the two-year process, the program was viewed as a whole, with input from faculty at every step, and also viewed from a micro-perspective by examining each course individually. The process included peer review, with each faculty member encouraged to review not only their own courses, but those of their colleagues as well. At times, the curricular review process seemed overwhelming with the significant amount of data and resource constraints to consider. The systematic process presented assisted in managing multiple considerations and constituents involved in the curriculum review. Besides maintaining a relevant and current curriculum, the process provided a multitude of benefits for the department. Significant changes were made to the curriculum, but more honest relationships were reestablished and an increased understanding among colleagues was an unexpected benefit of the lengthy, but necessary, examination of the program and resulting curricular changes in the department.

This paper’s commentary is guided by Gramsci’s distinction between, on one hand, the pessimism of the intellect and, on the other, optimism of the will. Accordingly, we seek initially to convey som...

PurposeThere is a growing consensus among human resources researchers and professionals that a participative environment can enhance job satisfaction, commitment, employee motivation and productivity. Moreover, globalization has caused that organizations operate in a huge number of culturally diverse countries. Studies suggest that understanding national culture as a prerequisite to implementing management initiatives such as employee participation in decision-making (PDM) acquires special interest. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to investigate the influence of cultural values on PDM in European organisations. The fulfilment of this purpose entails the following specific objectives: to measure the level of PDM in each European country; to examine the relationship between the six cultural dimensions proposed by Hofstede in 2010 (power distance, uncertainty avoidance, individualism/collectivism, masculinity/feminity, long term/short term and indulgence) and the PDM level of the organisations studied; and to define the national cultural profile of organisations that promote PDM the most and those that do the least.Design/methodology/approachOne factor analysis were applied to test the proposed hypotheses on a sample of almost 25,000 workers in 31 European countries (from the 6th European Working Conditions Survey) to identify direct employee PDM corresponding to each organisation included in the sample. Multiple linear regression was performed to test the hypotheses about the relationship between PDM and Hofstede culture values. Previously, a correlation analysis was performed between the independent variables of the regression model to examine the possibility of bias in coefficient significance tests because of multicollinearity. Finally, it presented a ranking of the analysed countries according to their PDM, including the value of their cultural dimensions. This information could be used to define the cultural profile of European participative countries.FindingsThe findings advance our understanding of how culture influencing on employee PDM in European organisations. Indulgence and masculinity are the most influent cultural dimensions. Moreover, results provide the cultural profile of those European countries that promote PDM the most and the least.Research limitations/implicationsThe research is based only on the perceptions of workers about their PDM but does not consider the managers’ opinion. Moreover, the document analyses the national culture as a single value shared by all the inhabitants of a country without considering the subcultures existing in it. Furthermore, future research should be conducted to analyse the influence of other conditions (such as activity sector, company size and owner public or private) on PDM–culture relationship.Practical implicationsThis study can be aid to managers in understanding the cultural profile of the country where their companies operate and the cultural differences between their employees. In this manner, they could implement the appropriate practices to promote the direct participation of employees in decision-making.Originality/valueTo broaden the knowledge, this is the first study investigating PDM across six cultural dimensions. The globalized and international business environment generates new challenges to multinational organizations that could pursue to increase direct PDM to get its benefits (a higher efficiency, performance, motivation, commitment and loyalty by the employee) in culturally diverse societies. The cultural values of the countries where organizations are located affect direct employee PDM. In particular, in this study, this occurs primarily with the variables masculinity, long-term orientation and indulgence. Moreover, this is a finding of high relevance because there is no empirical evidence in the effect of indulgence and long-term orientation on PDM because they were added later to Hofstede’s values.

Personalized learning refers to a collection of practices designed to place student interests and needs at the heart of schooling. Schools that implement personalized learning need leaders that sup...

Student–teacher relationships have been largely explored in literature from the perspective of successful relationships, i.e., what constitutes a successful relationship and how teachers build them. However, in moments of student defiance, resistance or pushback, how do teachers react? When teachers recount such moments, is the narrative one describing the teacher’s attempt to maintain authority and order, or do teachers provide a different narrative when recounting how they dealt with these difficult moments with students? This study seeks to identify narratives of power in teachers’ discourse within their stories about challenges in their relationships with students. Challenging relationships among teachers and students can stem from a struggle with power. Findings from the study examine how teachers use discourse to position themselves and their students within structures of power when reflecting on difficult or challenging relationships with students. The stories in this study contain some evidence of students’ resistance in refusing to meet teachers’ expectations or by pushing back on a teacher’s behaviour. Yet, teachers struggled to balance their authority and share power with students to negotiate a solution.

This study aimed to explore the principal’s perceptions about, and strategies for, increasing students’ active participation in the day-to-day affairs and decision-making at a secondary school located in a rural, mountainous region of Pakistan. By exploring the principal’s leadership practices, this study aims to answer the question, ‘how can school principals promote students’ participation in school leadership and, in turn, how can such participation ultimately lead to a socially just and democratic community?’ To us ‘school leadership’ is not a set of skills or positional authority that lies in one individual – the principal – but it is a practice which is widely distributed and engaged by a range of people including students in the day-to-day affairs and business of the school. Although, students’ participation in curricular and co-curricular activities and decision-making processes in schools is widely studied elsewhere, there is hardly any study on this topic in the context of Pakistan, particularly with reference to rural schools. Therefore, an empirical investigation based on a qualitative case study method was conducted to collect data from the principal as well as from other members of the school community regarding the leadership practices that promote students’ active participation in school affairs. The findings of the study reveal a number of interesting and contextually relevant strategies used by the principal as well as the gaps between his beliefs and practices and the challenges he faces in increasing students’ participation in various activities and decisions at the school.

The purpose of the study was to investigate the leadership practices that elementary school administrators and leadership teams utilize to promote effective, successful, and sustainable schoolwide positive behavioral interventions and supports (SWPBIS). The study focused on the practices, processes, and challenges that administrators and school leaders indicated led to the successful implementation of the SWPBIS framework. Twenty-four school leaders (six administrators; 18 leadership team members) from five elementary schools with platinum recognition for their high-quality SWPBIS implementation participated. School administrators participated in an in-person interview, and leadership team members participated in focus group interviews. Results revealed that successful SWPBIS framework implementation was promoted by establishing a distributed leadership approach that leveraged teachers as leaders while shaping their buildings’ systems of practices and processes, providing training and professional development to staff, establishing buy-in by stakeholders, and engaging stakeholders in their PBIS efforts.

Family involvement has become increasingly recognized as essential to academic success. However, the racial and cultural gap between the teaching force and students in American schools is large and...

In community planning, the consequence of a failed or productive teaching and learning interaction could mean the preservation or destruction of someone’s house, a neighborhood school, a park, all ...

PurposeUnderstanding the relationship between distributed leadership and teachers commitment to change in the Chinese urban primary school context was the purpose of this study.Design/methodology/approachQuantitative research method is used in this study. For ensuring comprehensiveness, this research employed a random sampling method. This study took place in Chinese urban primary schools. A total of 350 questionnaires were circulated, 318 questionnaires were returned, and 291 questionnaires were valid, with a response rate of 90.9 per cent and a validity rate of 91.5 per cent.FindingsThe results of path analysis indicated that various dimensions of distributed leadership, including collaboration and cooperation, responsibility and accountability, and values and beliefs, had significant effects on group competence. Collaboration and cooperation and decision making had significant relationships with task analysis. Collaboration and cooperation, responsibility and accountability, and values and beliefs had significant effects on collective teacher efficacy as a single variable.Originality/valueThese findings contribute to the understanding of educational management in the Chinese context and advance knowledge about distributed leadership theories in an East Asian context.

Get an inside look at the discourse interactions of third- and fourth-grade students as they consider various design proposals to solve an engineering problem and negotiate a group decision. The au...

Teacher Leadership is an effective way to support positive school change (Lai and Cheung 2015; Mangin and Stoelinga in Effective teacher leadership, Teachers College Press, New York, pp 1–9, 2008). To accelerate success, professional development programs aimed at building teacher leadership have proliferated across the globe. And yet, teacher leaders attending such programs often report difficulty in transferring their new knowledge and skills to their schools in meaningful ways (Snoek and Volman in Teach Teach Educ 37:91–100, 2014). In this study, we propose these results may stem from a failure of such programs to support double loop learning. To test this idea, we apply Argyris and Schon’s (Theory in practice: increasing professional effectiveness, Jossey-Bass, San Francisco, 1996) theory of action framework as a tool to examine teachers’ (n = 13) and administrators’ (n = 6) experiences with a teacher leadership development program and specifically whether there were gaps in their espoused theories and theories-in-use. We find double loop learning occurred regarding informal teacher leadership and the cultural norms of autonomy, egalitarianism, and seniority. However, such learning did not extend to principals’ orientation towards shared decision making and authority. While administrators (re)-created structures for teacher leaders to participate in such decision-making (e.g., instructional leadership teams) (i.e., single loop learning), they failed to shift power and authority regarding decision-making in these venues. As a result, teacher leaders’ efficacy was diminished as was the school’s ability to fully engage in change.

Communities of practice, based on the work of Etienne Wenger, is being adopted as a framework in higher education to facilitate and foster professional learning. This article describes the emergenc...

Student-staff pedagogical partnership is a rapidly expanding practice documented by a growing body of scholarship. That scholarship includes a wide range of empirical examples of what students and ...

The present study is a developmental review that aims to conceptualise, using empirical data, the mediating paths connecting effective school leadership (i.e. transformational leadership and distributed leadership) to teachers’ affective and normative organisational commitment. The review is based on empirical studies on teachers’ organisational commitment published in peer-review journals during two decades. Data analysis resulted in an integrative conceptual model where two central paths – socio-affective factors and teachers’ psychological capital – mediated the impact of effective school leadership on teachers’ organisational commitment. This synthesised model, with its higher-level generalisability, extends the scope of previous research and may stimulate interest in new empirical explorations in effective school leadership research.

Teachers and students are the main stakeholders of educational policies in the states; hence, the higher order policies, rules, and regulations must be in alignment with their rights, values, ideologies, needs, competencies, and peculiarities of each region and district. In such a case, the classroom practice will be improved and more promising outputs will be obtained. Iranian previous language programs failed to enhance students’ communicative competence and linguistic needs to survive at the international level; hence, an educational reform occurred to change the language curricula and English textbooks. A total of 86 Iranian English language teaching (ELT) teachers were selected through snowball sampling to find their role in the recent REFORM in Iranian ELT curricula and policies. Analysis of oral interviews and online focus groups data was conducted through Strauss and Corbin’s constant comparative method and illuminated the status quo of reform and policies, the marginalization of teachers as the sole implementers in language classrooms, and suggestions for teachers’ involvement in educational policies. These findings stress that a change within higher education policy makers’ attitude toward engagement of teachers within educational policy and decision-makings improves the classroom outputs.

Purpose This paper aims to explore the perceptions of pre-school educators for the application of total quality philosophy in kindergartens in the prefecture of Corinthia, Greece. Dimensions, such as the adoption of quality philosophy in the pre-school unit by the superiors, the active participation of teachers in decision-making and human resource management parameters, are examined. Design/methodology/approach The methodological approach of qualitative research was selected for the collection, processing and analysis of data based on the methodological tools of the interview with a semi-structured questionnaire and deliberate random sampling of kindergarten teachers serving in public units where they have teaching and/or administrative tasks. Findings The analysis of the data shows that there is no particular familiarity with the basic parameters of total quality philosophy in pre-school education and is related to empirical planning and lack of long-term vision. However, participatory decision-making and emotional intelligence are found as essential elements for ensuring an efficient and open-ended school culture. Originality/value The study is the first of its kind in Greece and abroad and its findings can be used to enrich the thematic scope of application of total quality management dimensions to pre-school education and in particular, those dimensions related to the leadership profile of teachers exercising responsibility tasks.

Teaching and learning chemistry or science, in general, could be described as building upon learners' existing conceptions. In order to support individual conceptual development, teachers should create opportunities for students to become aware of their thoughts. As this is very demanding in chemistry classroom practice with twenty-five or more individuals, pedagogical approaches and instructional support are needed. We argue for a collaborative learning practice that focuses on sharing and discussing individual conceptions on a chemistry-based phenomenon to build up a joint conceptual understanding. We state seven essential features for integrating this collaborative pedagogy successfully in classroom practice: (1) Becoming aware of one's own conceptions; (2) externalizing individual ideas; (3) initiating comparable situation models; (4) ensuring active involvement of all; (5) offering each learner opportunities to reflect on each other's conceptual understanding; (6) integrating decision-making processes; (7) offering the teacher measures to monitor the learning process. This paper is structured in three parts. Part I gives theoretical evidence to these essential features. Part II introduces the peer-interaction-method (PIM) as one of the possible collaborative learning approaches. The PIM is a pre-structured two-step collaborative learning method with instructional measures to meet the seven features. Part III reports a study with 136 students (grade 8 and 9), learning with the PIM in the context of combustion. The results give evidence to the features as being promising to foster individuals’ conceptual development in science learning. The paper concludes with a discussion, limitations and an outlook for further studies and pedagogies in the context of developing conceptual understanding in collaborative settings.

In this paper, two researchers reflect on the institutional space for participatory governance in a participatory action research (PAR) process that was initiated by the Ministry of Education, Culture and Science (ECS) in the Netherlands. It was implemented in two schools by researchers contracted by the ministry. The project’s aim was to explore possibilities for involving schools in policy processes using PAR. We conclude that PAR sheds light on the communication strategies, power and authority balances, and meaning of participation among the participants. The attempt to break through traditional hierarchies generated new insights into the institutional space at both the participating schools and the government institutions that can be used to create participatory approaches to governance. The researchers were the bridging actors between the schools and the government institutions. While previous research showed that a bridging actor can play a positive role as an objective party who is able to deliberate between the participants, we found that it impeded the creation of a participatory governance space.

Demand for school reform, particularly urban schools labeled as “failing,” requires a community engagement strategy centered on intermingled social problems: poverty, racial isolation and discrimin...

If judged against prevailing understandings of community schools (CSs) in the scholarly literature, all Romanian schools should qualify as CSs in light of the regulatory framework. However,...