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Purpose: This article develops a critique of contemporary understandings and practices related to well-being in education. It proposes a fuller development of wholeness and purpose that supplements and goes beyond the new well-being agenda. Design/Approach/Methods: This article draws upon a document analysis of conceptual and policy frameworks related to well-being. It builds its critique of well-being with reference to a qualitative study consisting of 222 interviews with educators in the Canadian province of Ontario with regard to their understandings of well-being. It includes references to the research and development work in the U.S., Germany, and Norway. Findings: The inclusion of well-being in policy agendas is an important step forward in the field of educational change, but this indication of progress is in danger of being reified through simplistic understandings of life satisfaction and other frameworks that evade the complexity of human development. Wholeness and purpose are concepts that include but also go beyond well-being that should be addressed by educators. Originality/Value: Most of the criticisms of the new well-being agenda in educational policies and research simply assume its status as a "summum bonum" for human development. This essay acknowledges the importance of well-being but expands beyond it to define wholeness and purpose as an alternative set of constructs with their own independent integrity that should not simply be subsumed into current well-being agendas.

Social-emotional learning (SEL) programs have become one of the most popular tools that schools use to help students learn to manage their emotions and build better relationships. But Dennis Shirley and Andy Hargreaves argue that these programs are insufficient to help students face today's challenges. It would be far better, they explain, for schools to focus on programs that enhance students' well-being. A focus on well-being involves no longer relying on psychological solutions to solve societal problems. Instead, education leaders must look to the root causes that underlie student distress and seek to address those issues. They propose three places to start: (1) promoting a prosperity agenda, (2) encouraging ethnical technology use, and (3) embracing the restorative power of nature. Further, instead of teaching students to tamp down negative emotions, schools should empower them to marshal those emotions to bring about needed change in these areas and thus promote their own well-being.

The article explores the critical issue of student attendance and engagement in education, particularly in the wake of COVID-19 pandemic. Topics discussed include the detrimental impact of chronic absenteeism, the five enemies of student engagement such as disenchantment and disconnection, and the importance of fostering a sense of magic and wonder in the learning experience to counteract these challenges.

In small rural schools, despite the nourishing sense of community, there is the constant danger of professional isolation. Without enough colleagues for a typically structured PLC, teachers have plenty of community but not enough structured professional learning. With the NW RISE network, however, rural educators are connecting with "job-alike" peers in other states so they can plan lessons across schools; develop shared curricula; and place students in direct contact with one another as writers, readers, and mathematicians.

While it can be tempting to embrace popular new ideas and practices in education, it is also important to be aware of their flaws or challenges. By examining the downsides of social-emotional learning strategies, the authors of this article argue that one can actually improve and strengthen them. After researching SEL strategies in the Ontario, Canada, school districts, Hargreaves and Shirley outline some questions to ask about SEL programs that can help make them more effective and beneficial to students and teachers everywhere.

Faculty members pursue external grants to support educational initiatives, but must do so mindfully because grants inadvertently can undermine core instructional activities. To reach full leadership potential, faculty members should act as "street-level democrats," focused on the needs of students, teachers, and the communities served. This article illustrates how the leaders of the Massachusetts Coalition for Teacher Quality and Student Achievement used this concept to enhance the preparation of student teachers to work in urban school systems.

Teachers' unions and community organizing emerged out of shared collective struggles for social justice in the United States in the twentieth century. Beyond broad general aspirations for a better society, however, their interests and tactics have not always been compatible. This interpretive essay revisits three recent case studies of interaction between teachers and community organizing groups to investigate the conditions that can lead to episodic tactical relationships, entrenched polarization, or solidarity. The cases indicate that while there are many potential causes of mistrust between teachers and community activists, concrete and practical strategies can be forged that can improve student learning, benefit teachers collectively, and increase community engagement in public schools.

Recent social policy reforms have sought to overcome the limitations of "First Way" strategies emphasizing the welfare state and "Second Way" approaches advocating markets. Scholars and policymakers instead have begun to explore optimal synthesis of the public and private sector in a new "Third Way" of leadership and change. According to one line of interpretation advanced by Andy Hargreaves and Dennis Shirley, however, the Third Way as developed in education has ushered in a new orthodoxy of testing, accountability, and data-driven decision making. This new orthodoxy is said to distract educators from their true moral purposes. Hence, Hargreaves and Shirley have called for a new "Fourth Way" of change that draws upon international best practices in education. In this interpretive essay for a "Festschrift" issue of the "Journal of Educational Change" celebrating Andy Hargreaves' 60th birthday, Dennis Shirley revisits Fourth Way change architecture to inquire after the appropriate role of new technologies in classrooms and schools. He retrieves the concept of mindful teaching and learning from the Fourth Way change model and illustrates how it can be used as a lens to adjudicate various interpretations of the appropriate role of new technologies in schools.

Teachers might be working significantly more with one another, but principals are not. Superintendents might bring principals together for district meetings or even to expose their performance results to colleagues in public, but principal collaboration is too often trumped by district control. Even worse, more and more schools and their principals are now in direct competition. Schools compete with their neighbors for the most marketable families and their children and for the best teachers and staff. Charter schools compete with all their surrounding public schools for human as well as financial resources. There is an aspect of hypocrisy in school leadership: Teachers collaborate, but principals compete. This is morally and professionally inconsistent. It prevents schools from learning from one another and has a negative effect on student achievement results. It doesn't have to be this way. Schools and their principals should collaborate together--many principals in other high-performing countries already do, and more U.S. principals must follow suit. The authors have been recently studying high-performing systems in education across the world and outside education, too. What they are learning is that one reason organizations perform far above what one might expect is that they have a collaborative edge. They use collaboration to gain extra advantage: an additional push in performance and results. They are also on the leading edge of what actually counts as collaborative practice. In this article, the authors look at four examples. (Contains 1 online resource.)

Ten years ago community organizing as a form of educational change had only begun to challenge traditional models of school reform. Yet a decade later, community organizing has led to important changes in school and community relationships that have been documented by scholars in the areas of education, sociology, social work, and political science. Current US President Barack Obama, a former organizer who worked on the South Side of Chicago, has given new visibility to community organizing. The American Educational Research Association (AERA) has approved the creation of a new Special Interest Group (SIG) on the topic of community and youth organizing. This article traces the origins, spread, and impacts of community organizing on educational change, arguing that it provides an important repertoire of practices for change leaders.

Background/Context: This study draws on the voluminous research on teachers' workplace orientations and especially on Dan Lortie's documentation of conservatism, individualism, and presentism among teachers. Purpose/Objective/Research Question/Focus of Study: This study investigated a school reform network of over 300 secondary schools entitled Raising Achievement Transforming Learning (RATL) to explore the role of the network's interventions in increasing or diminishing presentism. Setting: England. Population/Participants/Subjects: Quantitative performance data were analyzed for all 300 schools. Site visits were made to 10 RATL schools in which educational administrators and teachers were interviewed individually and in focus groups. Additional phone interviews were conducted with administrators in 14 RATL schools. Intervention/Program/Practice: RATL provided a combination of interventions and supports for schools in the network, including data analysis and capacity enhancement; partnering mentor schools with low-performing schools; regional conferences; a Web portal for schools in the project; and a menu of short-, medium-, and long-term strategies for change. Research Design: Qualitative interviews and focus groups of educators in RATL schools, along with secondary analysis of pupil performance data. Conclusions/Recommendations: In Dan Lortie's seminal research on teachers' workplace orientations, he identified "presentism," or short-term thinking, with conservatism and individualism. This research indicates that in the RATL project, individualism among teachers diminished, but this did not diminish either conservatism or presentism. The research identifies three kinds of presentism--endemic, adaptive, and addictive--that have amplified educational conservatism while altering its nature to fit the current culture and political economy of fast capitalism.

Almost all of the most recent school improvement strategies have focused on standards and accountability. But test data from assessments such as the National Assessment of Educational Progress indicate that such emphasis has had little impact on student achievement. Drawing from extensive research across national settings, Andy Hargreaves and Dennis Shirley present new data from innovative practices in Finland, Canada, England, and the United States to argue that we have now entered a new phase of change. This new wave of reforms--post-standardization--will allow for greater creativity, flexibility, inclusiveness, and inspiration in our schools. (Contains 23 endnotes.)

It is often assumed that parent participation in schools is primarily based on self-interest and that this is a frequent source of contention between parents and teachers. This article examines the experiences of members of the Jamaica Plain Parent Organizing Project (JP-POP), a community-based organization in Boston, and reveals that some parents have learned to act beyond their individual self-interest and to organize on behalf of the entire community as a result of their participation. The authors present qualitative data from interviews with JP-POP members to ascertain the motivations behind their initial decisions to become involved in education, the benefits they derive from their participation, and the gradual evolution of narrow definitions of self-interest to more communal understandings. Finally, they draw out implications for the potential capacity enhancement of community-based organizations in education at both the institutional and district levels. (Contains 14 notes.)