Psychological Safety is one of the most important conditions for team learning and has also been tied to improved organizational outcomes. The present study is an attempt to explore the influence of school leadership's task and relations-oriented behavior, leadership styles, and the schools' organizational culture on teachers' psychological…

Background/Context: While current research provides key insights about successful collaboration in which teachers experience deep learning and practice change, few studies analyze the content of teachers' collaborative conversations about instruction. Even fewer explore how the content of collaborative conversations evolves over time, making it…

A classic belief of the university as a place of public discourse (Arendt, 1979) without the need for close emotional connections (d'Entreves, 2019) is being challenged. As American colleges progressively evolve into large pluralistic societies that are interacting in transnational ways (Sweeny, Weaven, & Herington, 2008) across mass…

Urban middle schools face many accountability measures which often create the need for school improvement. Leading urban middle schools through the change process is extremely challenging for principals. The combination of leading change, leading urban schools, and leading middle schools is an uphill climb. Teachers' perceptions of leadership…

This article applies Engestrom's Activity Theory (AT) as an analytical lens to identify defining characteristics of the collaborative creative music making activities of composing and arranging. Attention is paid to the complex interrelationships among the various elements of interaction in children's collaborative creative music making as…

A description is given of a cooperative learning experience conduct with small groups of racially mixed, underachieving high school students. Twenty-nine students were organized in groups of three or four members each. The groups worked together in all laboratory assignments and daily work, and studied together for quizzes and tests in a science…

This article reviews the literature on high school athletics and the dynamics of athlete-coach relationships, describes the methodology of an ethnographic study of the culture of an inner-city high school swim team, and examines the characteristics and impact of one coach as he encouraged high academic achievement and talent development in his…

This practicum is designed to assist central office personnel in evaluating the work environment for better coordination to accomplish work, plan for a change effort, and implement a participatory change initiative. The work setting involved a K-12 urban school district (193 schools) containing 431 central-office administrators and more than…

This handbook for urban school staff provides guidelines and resource materials for implementing school needs assessment and communicating information about programs, services, and events in the school district to the community. It presents field-tested methods which have been utilized in a number of the largest public school districts. Part 1, on…