This research study focused on understanding changes that were taking place in Promotion and Tenure (P and T) practices in eight selected institutions of higher education in the state of Georgia and examined factors, if any, that were acting as a catalyst for change. The research team used both quantitative and qualitative analyses of the P and T…

In this article, the authors propose a department-level curricular committee structure, called Strand Committees, as a mechanism to facilitate oversight and enact significant change to policies and practices in specific courses. The primary goal of the Strand Committees is improving both student success and instruction while upholding a high…

Liberty Elementary School is a school of 1,110 kindergarten through fifth-grade students in Canton, Georgia. As a 2018 National School of Character, Liberty Elementary is continuously working to maintain a culture of character while celebrating being only the third school in Georgia to be named a National School of Character. In this article, the…

Used by over 800 educator preparation programs in more than 40 states and the District of Columbia, edTPA seeks to measure content-specific outcomes of beginning teachers as a high-stakes assessment. Many states also use edTPA to inform teacher licensure or certification decisions, making the assessment consequential for individual teacher…

The educational system is in a continual state of refinement in an effort to improve effectiveness. Many decisions are made regarding policy and procedure at the individual school level ascending to the federal level. The majority workforce carrying out these reform efforts is comprised of classroom teachers. Teachers have the most direct…

What happens when teams from 57 cities building afterschool systems gather to discuss two key system responsibilities--improving afterschool programs and using data for informed decision-making? Lots of rich discussion. This report covers a national afterschool conference held in February 2013. It details what mayors, program providers, system…

Data-driven decision making (DDDM), applied to student achievement testing data, is a central focus of many school and district reform efforts, in part because of federal and state test-based accountability policies. This paper uses RAND research to show how schools and districts are analyzing achievement test results and other types of data to…

In 2002, the RAND Corporation launched a project to understand how educators are responding to the new accountability requirements in California, Georgia, and Pennsylvania--three states that represent a range of approaches, regions, and student populations. The researchers aimed to identify the factors that enhance the implementation of SBA…

Explains the complexities of promoting school change and how they can be minimized through the effective use of facilitators. Six complexities of school change are examined based on the experiences of Georgia's League of Professional Schools. Also discussed is the question of who should facilitate. (GLR)

How can school officials manage their responsibilities in ways that are likely to improve the quality of the product they provide? There is a logical sequence of activities. First, school officials must be able to diagnose where problems exist. Then they must learn to apply treatments systematically, to assess carefully the success or failure of…

Participants in the League of Professional Schools based at the University of Georgia discuss the effects of shared governance, a schoolwide instructional focus, and action research on 22 participating schools from various districts. The article explains factors that facilitated internal change and adjustments the league made in its operating…

The Georgia League of Professional Schools is a school and university collaborative formed to support school renewal. It currently includes 54 elementary and secondary schools and the University of Georgia. Schoolwide action research is simply cooperative disciplined inquiry within a framework that provides some structures for working together.…

Success in today's K-12 environment often hinges on improved test scores. But success should be defined more broadly to recognize the overall learning environment that is created by students, teachers, staff members, administrators, and parents. As a middle level principal, the author has learned that to create long-lasting change and to foster a…

A study was conducted to examine the perspective of planned change as a conscious, deliberate effort to improve systematic operations and to explore assumptions implicit in theory and literature regarding readiness for change. Entry data were collected at orientation and planning workshops for 42 League of Professional Schools teams from Georgia…