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ERIC Number: ED208473
Record Type: RIE
Publication Date: 1981-Apr
Pages: 25
Abstractor: N/A
ISBN: N/A
ISSN: N/A
EISSN: N/A
One Way to Train for the Problems of Administrators.
Townsend, Richard G.
An account of an effort to inculcate the habit of collegiality in advanced students in school administration, this paper describes an exercise in "simulated deliberation" focusing on policy formulation. According to the author, who was also group leader, students were given basic facts surrounding a problem in race relations and asked to identify the problem, what data they needed, the obstacles, how to surmount the obstacles, and other pertinent information. They then divided into task forces with the initial mission of formulating a preferred policy arising from the information given them. Goals were to learn the utility of "casing a situation," to use key terms in asking questions about a phenomenon, and then to generate frameworks for understanding and affecting that situation. The author gives a detailed description of the activities of the task forces and makes suggestions for revising the simulation. He concludes that this approach is one way for students to realize that there is no world of independent facts, that problems have no existence separate from the involvement of the policy-makers, that data do not exist except as they are called into existence and weighed by human interests, and that possibilities for structuring reality are infinite. (Author/JM)
Publication Type: Speeches/Meeting Papers; Opinion Papers; Reports - Descriptive
Education Level: N/A
Audience: N/A
Language: English
Sponsor: N/A
Authoring Institution: N/A
Grant or Contract Numbers: N/A
Note: Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Educational Research Association (Los Angeles, CA, April 13-17, 1981).