Identifies five building blocks of school restructuring forming the foundation for comprehensive educational change. Identifies four overarching restructuring issues, including administrative and teacher leadership, the dilemma of process versus content, balancing student and teacher needs, and achieving a balance between action and reflection.…

From her own experience as a secondary teacher in the People's Republic of China, the author concludes that multiyear student/teacher relationships have great potential for improving the academic and social/emotional environments of secondary schools. In China, the multiyear commitment gives teachers considerable academic autonomy and demands…

Research on class size during the past decade indicates that dramatically smaller classes significantly improve student performance, do not encourage adoption of drastically different teaching methods, and lead to increased student-teacher contact. Other research suggests techniques for working with small groups and for reorganizing school…

Describes size, contents, organization, and social psychological function of teachers' rooms in Japanese junior high schools, which serve as centers of daily educational activities and interactions among teachers, between teachers and students, and among students themselves. (PKP)

To counter the factory model, Elizabeth City-Pasquotank (North Carolina) Public Schools have adopted a knowledge-work organization metaphor and applied it to four school subsystems: organizational structure, student accomplishments, teaching and learning, and assessment. Viewing the school as a knowledge-work organization elevates students to…

The Carnegie structure, involving seven-period days and nine different locations daily, is an ineffective system. The Copernican plan changes school scheduling by lengthening instructional periods for fewer and smaller classes. The system should improve teacher-student relationships, lighten workloads, and introduce innovative evaluation and…

Few great ideas to guide school practice are totally new. Conscientious educators have hit some good chords over the years; the challenge is recapturing that music and building a (pedagogical) symphony around it. Philosophical ideas about teachers' views of children, curriculum, teachers, and organizational structures are discussed. (MLH)