Transformational Leadership: Industrial, Military, and Educational Impact

Teaching in the knowledge society: education in the age of insecurity

Purpose – This paper aims to provide a TQM framework that stresses continuous improvements in teaching as a plausible means of TQM implementation in higher education programs.Design/methodology/approach – The literature survey of the TQM philosophies and the comparative analysis of TQM adoption in industry versus higher education provide the theoretical and practical background for this work. The analysis of TQM in higher education was done considering various critical factors such as existing educational practices, the barriers of TQM and the return on investment (ROI) of TQM implementations. These explorations led to the development of a TQM framework that adopts Deming's wheel of Plan‐Do‐Check‐Act (PDCA) cycle for implementing continuous improvements in higher education programs.Findings – Unlike the scenario in industry, TQM philosophies have to be adapted suitably for a successful implementation in higher education. The proposed TQM framework with six core quality elements encompassing the seven‐step...

A framework for implementing TQM in higher education programs

Bilingual Education: from Compensatory to Quality Schooling

Currently the press to make policy and practice decisions on the basis of evidence is being coupled with recognition that real change requires shifts in organizational culture. Consequently, there are now many efforts to “re-culture” organizations by making evidence central to decision making. In this article, the authors problematize the notion of a “culture of evidence” in teacher education. Then the article identifies four key aspects involved in efforts to create a culture of evidence at one institution over a five-year period: (1) development of a portfolio of studies about processes and outcomes; (2) recognition that teacher education always poses values questions as well as empirical questions; (3) an exploratory, open-ended approach to evidence construction; and, (4) multiple structures that institutionalize evidence collection and use locally and beyond. The authors suggests that building cultures of evidence has the potential to be transformative in teacher education, but only if challenges rela...

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“Re-Culturing” Teacher Education: Inquiry, Evidence, and Action

In many teacher education programs, some form of inquiry or practitioner research is now included in the preservice teacher education curriculum. The intention is to help teacher candidates become professionals who are lifelong learners who raise questions and research their practice across the professional career. At the same time, teacher education evaluation has shifted from primary emphasis on resources and curriculum to an emphasis on K-12 student learning outcomes. This article speaks to the outcomes focus of teacher education policy and practice and to the agenda to prepare professional teachers who know how to learn from and about teaching in an ongoing way. The article describes an inquiry project carried out by a group of teacher education practitioner-researchers to examine how and what teacher candidates learned when they were required to conduct classroom inquiry focused on student learning outcomes. The purpose of the study was to explore the processes and results of this new focus ...

Inquiry on Inquiry: Practitioner Research and Student Learning

The following case study (Stake, 2000) explores the collective properties of the group of leaders working together to enact instructional change in an urban high school (Spillane, et al., 2001). It documents how an urban public high continues to work toward developing and enacting a model of leadership that is transformational, distributed, and democratic and the challenges and successes it has encountered as it struggles to establish such leadership in the context of educational reform which by nature is transactional. The subsequent discussion applies the characteristics of transactional leadership to educational reform, identifies several characteristics of effective urban school leadership, documents the evolution of collective leadership in one urban high school, and asserts that the transactional framework of systemic leadership necessitates school leadership that is collective, democratic, and comprehensive in its breadth of interdependence (Gronn, 2003) if instructional transformation is to occur.

Beyond mediocrity: transformational leadership within a transactional framework

This case study explored the effectiveness of telementoring as a vehicle for preservice teachers to hone skills in the teaching of writing, to establish a mentoring relationship with urban high school students, and to help struggling writers improve writing skills necessary for student achievement. Inherent in this research was the goal to develop a collaborative model between the university and the high school for using technology to improve “at-risk” urban students’ skills in writing. Additionally, the research allowed preservice teachers to learn about themselves as evolving teachers as they broached some of the difficulties of teaching writing to academically diverse students and learned about the scarcity of resources and difficult realities that exist for urban students.

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Telementoring as a Collaborative Agent for Change

Teachers’ voices explore and document what is at stake when they are excluded from power-brokering conversations that mandate how teachers practice and model democracy in classrooms Case study vignettes, interviews, classroom observations, and reflections of teachers in urban and suburban schools reveal four significant teacher subcultures of democratic practice: a subculture of compliance, a subculture of noncompliance, a subculture of subversion, and a subculture of democratic inquiry and practice Analyses reveal that each subculture poses significant stakes for teachers, preservice teachers, the teaching profession, pupils, and society writ large

Teacher subcultures of democratic practice amidst the oppression of educational reform

Forty-three female undergraduate and graduate students preparing for careers as educators provided Omnibus Personality Inventory and Reflective Judgment Interview data. The sample included 14 seniors, 15 master's candidates, and 14 doctoral candidates. Each educational level group included participants with a range of intellectual disposition scores as measured by the Omnibus Personality Inventory. Scores on six scales of the Omnibus Personality Inventory correlated significantly with Reflective Judgment Interview scores (p < .05): thinking introversion, response bias, altruism, autonomy, complexity, and theoretical orientation. These findings support the conclusion that postformal reasoning, as described in P. M. King and K. S. Kitchener's (1994) reflective judgment model of cognitive development, is related to measurable personality traits.

Audrey A. Friedman

Papers

Inquiry on Inquiry: Practitioner Research and Student Learning

Beyond mediocrity: transformational leadership within a transactional framework

Telementoring as a Collaborative Agent for Change

Teacher subcultures of democratic practice amidst the oppression of educational reform

The Relationship Between Personality Traits and Reflective Judgment Among Female Students