Recent developments in cognitive anthropology, in particular the development of ethnographic semantics, make ethnographic methods more systematic. The goal is to replace intuition with an operationally explicit methodology for discerning how people construe their world of experience from the way they talk about it. The first part of this paper…

This study investigated what university and college department chairpersons believe are the most important duties of their position, how they view their roles, and the relationship of perceived roles and duties. Possible role definitions included seeing department chair work as leader, scholar, faculty developer, or manager. The study surveyed 800…

Survey responses from over half of Oklahoma City's 2,500 teachers indicated their views of the effectiveness and leadership of the city's 94 school principals. The survey's 82 items were selected from ideas suggested in the principal effectiveness literature and from the leadership component of Oklahoma City's prinipal evaluation forms. The…

Research administrators can avoid falling into bureaucratic traps by (1) understanding what is important and what is subordinate to it; (2) becoming a better manager; and (3) improving public relations by being more accessible, soliciting complaints, consulting, supporting clients, making the rules work for clients, and educating clients.

This background paper for a symposium on the school of the future reviews the current instructional applications of computers in the classroom (the computer as a means or the subject of instruction), and suggests strategies that administrators might use to move toward viewing the computer as a productivity tool for students, i.e., its use for word…

This paper explores the notion of philosophic-mindedness as it relates to the conceptions of educational leadership and democracy. Three essential questions are treated: (1) Ought educational leaders to be philosophic in their work? (2) Need educational leaders be democratic? and (3) How do these conceptions of leadership, democracy, and…

As part of the Study of Dissemination Efforts Supporting School Improvement, researchers looked at how the activities of, perceptions of, and opinions about the building administrator affect the outcome of efforts to implement new practices. This paper describes a sample of building administrators working in the 146 school districts that…

Public school superintendents consider situational and organizational variables when determining whether to involve others in decision-making processes. A sample of 240 superintendents from Washington, Oregon, and Idaho were sent the Situational Administrative Decision-Making Inventory. The sample was evenly divided geographically and by district…

The research on supervision and school effectiveness suggests that principals acting as supervisors of instruction make a difference in teacher performance and pupil learning. This study investigated whether effective clinical supervision requires supervisors who practice certain strategies and procedures as they dialogue with supervisees, or…

This report, part of a research series on roles of participants in high school change, focuses on activities of school district office personnel. Interview and observational data were gathered in nine states. Following a discussion of relevant literature, study findings are presented in five categories: description of regular jobs and roles of…

Principals exhibiting different kinds of administrative behavior tend to be influenced by different kinds of factors, according to the results of two sets of related studies reported in this document. The first set, consisting of three studies of principals and central administrators, explored the factors shaping principals' behaviors when the…

Partial results are reported from a longitudinal study that investigated role learning among teachers seeking and obtaining principalships or assistant principalships. Data were obtained from indepth interviews with 14 administrative candidates. A brief theoretical discussion classifies new administrators' job behavior according to three responses…

This paper considers the kinds of interventions that elementary school principals make for the purpose of improving practice in their schools. Findings are derived from the Principal-Teacher Interaction Study being conducted at the University of Texas at Austin, which has categorized interventions hierarchically at the following levels: policy,…

This report describes and analyzes the role played by key actors in initiating and implementing major reform in the management of the department of education in Victoria, the second largest state in Australia. Focus is during 1979-84, the time of the greatest administrative reform in the department's history. Study goals include the analysis of…

This exploratory study investigated the leadership styles of selected administrators in Tennessee's public schools. Styles of leadership were viewed against a backdrop of current brain research, and the subjects' underlying patterns of cognitive processing were identified by means of a self-report measurement of brain dominance--the Herrmann Brain…