Total Quality Management Plus (TQM) goes beyond customer satisfaction to consider quality of life, environmental conditions, crime rates, and health and well-being. Steps to integrate such concerns into the TQM process include being ready for challenges, creating a quality system to collect performance data, defining the ideal school and world…

Increasingly, children who learn good conflict-management skills find themselves negotiating with kids who would rather fight--even over minor matters like cutting into line, taking a pencil, or touching a classmate's desk. A Pittsburgh teacher has worked to create a physically and emotionally safe classroom and devised a Students Against Violence…

A New Zealand survey found that elementary and secondary teachers were concerned about four key technology management issues: planning, access, technical support, and professional development. Teachers recommended that principals have a clear, democratically constructed policy on the place of educational technologies in the school curriculum,…

When the pandemic took hold, the superintendent of Selma City Schools realized the strategic plan her district had in place wasn't enough. She shares the collective steps her team took to embrace change and rethink what school could look like from the ground up.

Educators who encounter children facing trauma, present and past, can draw on practices that help all students--like building relationships and helping kids create their own "wellness tools" to handle challenging emotions. See how this educator weaves children's literature and art into practices like these.

As European schools have become more autonomous, inservice education has changed from a way to update professional knowledge to a tool for change. This article describes recent inservice education developments, emerging guidelines, choices and trends, and problems and challenges. School-based programs are challenged by competing agency programs…

Self-directed student learning begins with self-directed educators. Teachers in Greenville, North Carolina, are training in the Habits of Mind, a series of thinking behaviors that support self-directed learning by helping students successfully tackle complex problems. The authors outline key instructional strategies that have grown from these…

In this article, researchers Dick M. Carpenter II and Grant Clayton explore common enrollment systems (CESs)--how they work and what school leaders can learn from districts that have implemented CESs. Denver, New Orleans, and Newark (New Jersey) have rolled out this centralized enrollment process for all district-run and charter schools in their…

One Canadian school district, seeking to help ease the anxiety, stress, and depression issues their teens reported, piloted a program to include students in school climate survey data analysis. Small groups of teenagers, staff, and administrators from the district's schools meet twice a year to discuss the data and real-world solutions to bring…

Faced with the possibility of mandatory continuing education laws, educators can learn from the mistakes and successes of other professions. Teachers and administrators must take a leadership role in planning and participating in continuing education programs throughout their professional careers. (Author/MLF)

The Italian education system was built on Napoleonic and Prussian models, with considerable power vested in the central government and many formal and legal controls. In 1994, after a 20-year failed experiment with governing school councils, the Minister of Education proposed reforms based on notions of autonomy. The current minister also favors…

Most teachers find it difficult to achieve a balance between their work lives and their personal lives. Today, technology and increasing connectivity make maintaining this delicate balance more challenging than ever. Because learning is no longer limited to a certain time or place, connected educators face an interesting dilemma: When, and how…

By directing the change from an MBO system to a building-based goal program, a Pennsylvania superintendent enabled each building's staff and community to focus on an individual area of need (environmental education), as determined by a grassroots needs assessment effort. Students, parents, teachers, and administrators gathered and analyzed data,…

Discusses the need for preservice education that prepares teachers and administrators to work collaboratively with support staff and develop a positive school climate. Includes a description of the New Haven Schools Project's support network for high-risk students. (MD)

Suggests that educational accountability is basically a simplistic application of business administration models to education and argues that accountability has failed to deal with the complexities of the school environment, to provide a conceptual framework appropriate to educational settings, or to provide means for developing viable alternative…