Purpose: This paper aims to examine the roles of quality managers at community colleges, their experiences balancing accountability and improvement and their insights into the future of quality assurance. Design/methodology/approach: This phenomenological, qualitative study used semi-structured interviews with eight community college quality…

This phenomenological case study explored how the lived experiences of three self-identified culturally responsive high school leaders impacted the systemic decisions they made for their school and their students. The study also investigated how these lived experiences informed the leaders' responses to their stakeholders' reactions to the…

This dissertation showcases collective sensemaking in action. The study was situated in a larger North Carolina project, in which educators took a systems approach to update the state's instructional guidance infrastructure during content standards reform. Specifically, I investigated how K-5 educators from multiple stakeholder groups--teachers,…

The COVID-19 pandemic has significantly affected the higher education sector in Singapore. Existing tertiary studies seeking to understand the intraperiod response to COVID-19 often focus on single institutions, jurisdictions or stakeholder groups. This study is the first in-depth qualitative multi-stakeholder examination of the higher education…

The COVID-19 pandemic has deeply impacted the field of education, highlighting many problems to be considered by educational leaders as schools emerge from the pandemic. In planning to address challenges and consider innovation, school leaders are encouraged to implement changes in curriculum and assessment to meet the needs of contemporary…

When facilitating large-scale instructional change, leaders face stakeholder tensions that arise from different institutional pressures. Over the past 4 years, we have created an innovative "live" case competition in a strategic management course as our college's signature undergraduate experiential learning opportunity. This case has…

This study aims to gain a better understanding of the Finnish national curriculum reform by examining how the educational practitioners, at the district level, orchestrate the shared sense-making concerning the reform work in their school districts. Qualitative focus group data was collected from 12 groups, throughout Finland, that were…

The purpose of this study was to determine how stakeholders engaged in school-university partnerships, specifically in the work preparing future school administrators, created and captured value for their own organizations. These case studies examined three partnerships that involved three school systems who all partnered with the same college,…

Building relationships is the essence of the community college. Higher education administrators learned long ago that building rapport with businesses, state and local government, and constituents is the best way to represent the interests of the community. But that does not make it easy. Board members come and go and the shifting dynamics of…

We use the framework of institutional pluralism to provide new insights into a controversial process of market-based reform-school closures. School closure is a shock that highlights the dynamics and definitions of failure and surfaces values and meanings that might otherwise be hidden from consideration. Using qualitative data from a closing…

This paper examines technology-mediated advising reform in order to contribute to the understanding of how colleges engage in transformative change to improve student outcomes. Conceptualizing such change as occurring along three interrelated dimensions of organizational functioning (structural, process, and attitudinal), we seek to understand the…

"Proceedings of International Conference on Social and Education Sciences" includes full papers presented at the International Conference on Social and Education Sciences (IConSES), which took place on October 7-10, 2019, in Denver, Colorado. The aim of the conference is to offer opportunities to share ideas, discuss theoretical and…

The 1988 Education Reform Act radically transformed the local governance of education, according school governing bodies new delegated powers for budgets and staff as well as responsibility for the strategic direction of the school in a quasi market place of parental choice. To take up these new responsibilities the earlier Education Act 1986 had…

"Proceedings of International Conference on Social and Education Sciences" includes full papers presented at the International Conference on Social and Education Sciences (IConSES) which took place at the Holiday Inn & Suites Denver Tech Center-Centennial on October 7-10, 2019 in Denver, CO, USA. The aim of the conference is to offer…

In the last few years, radical neo-liberal reforms have been introduced in the Greek Higher Education sector. The new "reforms" challenge the traditionally high autonomy of Higher Education (HE) institutions in matters of administrative regulations, study structures, assessment of students and teachers. The new rhetoric of the Greek…