During the last three decades Swedish education has undergone radical decentralisation involving increased school autonomy. One aspect of this change is the gradual weakening of the state regulation of teaching time. Thus, Sweden is somewhat of an extreme in the EU. This is accentuated by a five-year experiment, where 900 compulsory schools were…

Hierarchical educational structures employ a standards-driven decision-making atmosphere that challenges teachers' autonomy. This situation represents a critical issue for teacher educators who must consider how they will teach candidates to respond to these settings. We argue that teacher empowerment represents a moral issue that teacher…

This paper describes how Turkish teachers of English in state primary education approach the implementation of a Communicative-Oriented Curriculum innovation and factors that impact on teachers' classroom practices. Using multidimensional research procedures, including a questionnaire, observations and teacher interviews, a picture has been…

Impoverished populations and schools in rural areas face special challenges that are different from other settings. Among these are the distances from social services, the sparse availability of assistance programs, and the shortage of resources to support educational programs and student learning. Rural schools, do, however, have assets that can…

The dominant cultural image of veteran teachers is conveyed in the fictional life story of Mr Chipping of Brookfield School as conveyed in James Hilton's short novel "Goodbye, Mr Chips." This reflects emerging ideals and practices of teacher professionalism in England from the 1920s onwards in terms of its emphasis on autonomy and…

A continuing need for comprehensive and timely information about the public school teachers of the United States led the National Education Association (NEA) Research Division in 1956 to develop the first of a series of surveys and subsequent reports covering various aspects of teachers' professional, family, and civic lives. The NEA has conducted…

Reports of a recruitment and retention crisis amongst teachers in England led the government to develop a Workforce Remodelling strategy for schools. This involved change at both a legislative level, removing administrative tasks from teachers and ensuring all teaching staff had 10% off-timetable for planning, preparation and assessment (PPA)…

This paper explores a distributed leadership perspective on how leaders create contexts that build and support professional communities in schools. It is argued that professional community results from intentional coordination of social interaction among teachers through the design of structures in a situation of practice. School leaders put these…

Beyond some contracted minimum, salaried workers' hours are largely chosen at the worker's discretion and should respond to the strength of contract incentives. Accordingly, we consider the response of teacher hours to accountability and school choice laws introduced in U.S. public schools over the past two decades. Total weekly hours of full-time…

The troubled economy is driving school organizations to become more efficient and driving the business community to demand that schools produce graduates with different sets of skills. States are finally uniting around common student learning standards as the student population grows more diverse. And the new administration is pouring an…

Principals as change agents must work with teachers to establish a climate conducive to change. Principals should assume an assertive change posture and improve their skills in dealing with various factors influencing change. Teacher discontent with working conditions is a key ingredient in the change process. (MLH)

Previous educational reform efforts have not made significant, lasting improvements because they focused on correcting visible structural flaws. Educational organizations are social organisms held together by a symbolic webbing, not formal systems driven by goals, official roles, commands, and rules. Deep structures and practices must be…

Part-time faculty has become an important labor force in Chinese colleges and universities. The number of them has risen rapidly and its structure varies in different types of higher education institutes (HEIs), which results from integration of the social motivation and the inner motivation of schools' reform. From the institutional point of…

In this article, a parallel is drawn between Steven Hawking's use of common and novel metaphors in his evolving explanation of the theory of the universe and the similar use of common and novel metaphors by educators in four school contexts attempting to illuminate their experiences of school reform storied and restoried over time. The epistemic…