The Sharp Edge of Educational Change conveys the realities of reform as they affect educators' practice. The collected chapters each focus on particular current reform and reveal the technical and logistical complications, social and political dynamics, cognitive disjunctures and limitations, and emotional demands of reform. In so doing, they provide new and rich conceptual perspectives on the contemporary nature of teachers' and administrators' work in classrooms, schools and other educational settings.

In a public education world of vast, multiple, rapid, and often colliding educational reforms, Movements of Educational Reform provides the novice as well as the veteran educator and administrator a sort of map of educational changes and processes. Movements of Educational Reform is intended to help the devoted and dedicated education professional and scholar make sense of the successes and the pitfalls of reforms by tracing the landscape through four movements. Movements promises to ignite and energize your passion for leading educational reform and to bring awareness of system strategies and its structural and cultural aspects, many of which continue to challenge theorists, practitioners, and leaders of educational change.

Within educational research that seeks to understand the quality and effectiveness of teachers and school, the role emotions play in educational change and school improvement has become a subject of increasing importance. In this book, scholars from around the world explore the connections between teaching, teacher education, teacher emotions, educational change and school leadership. (For this text, “teacher” encompasses pre-service teachers, in-service teachers and headteachers, or principals). New Understandings of Teacher’s Work: Emotions and Educational Change is divided into four themes: educational change; teachers and teaching; teacher education; and emotions in leadership. The chapters address the key basic and substantive issues relative to the central emotional themes of the following: teachers’ lives and careers in teaching; the role emotions play in teachers’ work; lives and leadership roles in the context of educational reform; the working conditions; the context-specific dynamics of reform work; school/teacher cultures; individual biographies that affect teachers’ emotional well-being; and the implications for the management and leadership of educational change, and for development, of teacher education.

What conditions encourage the establishment of a framework for long-term teacher learning to support educational change? This text uses a systems thinking approach to draw together ideas from learning perspectives into a new theoretical framework.

What is assessed gets attention: what is not assessed does not. When higher education is expected to promote complex achievements in subject disciplines and in terms of 'employability', problems arise: how are such achievements to be assessed? In the first part, Knight and Yorke argue that existing grading practices cannot cope with the expectations laid upon them, while the potential of formative assessment for the support of learning is not fully realised. Improving the effectiveness of assessment depends, they claim, on a well-grounded appreciation of what assessment is and what may and may not be expected of it. The second part is about summative judgements for high-stakes purposes. Using established measurement theory, a view is developed of the conditions under which affordable, useful, valid and reliable summative judgements can be made. A conclusion is that many complex achievements resist high-stakes assessment, which directs attention to low-stakes, essentially formative, alternatives. Assessment for learning and employability demands more than module-level changes to assessment methods. The final part discusses how institutions need to respond in policy terms to the challenges that have been posed. This book has wide and practical relevance - to teachers, module and programme leaders, higher education managers and quality enhancement specialists.

* How can we understand and theorise school leadership? * How can school leadership work towards enhancing student learning? * What are the constraints and possibilities for school leadership at the beginning of a new century? This new title is relevant to anyone concerned with improving schooling and enhancing the professional practices of educators. The authors focus on leadership for enhancing student outcomes, both academic and social. While recognizing the significance of the principal or headteacher in school leadership, the authors argue a strong case for the dispersal of leadership: * Based on extensive research conducted within schools * Focuses on leading learning across the school * Theoretically sound; reflects the theories of Bourdieu and Foucault * Politically aware; discusses the context of leadership within school communities, educational systems, global pressures, new policy directions Current, topical and thoughtful, Leading Learning is key reading for principals or headteachers, teachers, and other school leaders, policy makers and for students studying educational administration.

This book brings together the literature in a field which may define the 21st century. Can economic and technological progress continue with educational systems which seem to answer to no one but themselves and which output graduates who can barely read and write and who have only the faintest clue how to use a map? This bibliography provides access via Title, Author and Subject Indexes. Contents: Educational Accountability; Educational Change; Educational Equalisation; Educational Leadership; Educational Planning; Educational Indicates.

... lists publications cataloged by Teachers College, Columbia University, supplemented by ... The Research Libraries of The New York Publica Library.

Within the methodological and conceptual framework of recent research on educational change, an evaluative case study was undertaken to investigate factors affecting longer-term sustainability of cross-cultural INSET initiatives in China. Four Sino-British initiatives were involved in the study, one of which was the main focus of the investigation, and the other three as supplementary sources of information. Fieldwork was conducted twice at two stages of the study for data gathering. The first was focused on the main initiative, and the second was on the three ancillary ones. Semi-structured interviews, questionnaires and documentation were utilised as major instruments to obtain information from a multiplicity of groups of stakeholders concerned. The findings that emerged from the study highlight seven intrinsic factors and six extrinsic factors as well as cultural adaptation as decisive to the longer-term sustainability of such initiatives. It was found that to enhance the prospects of sustainability of such initiatives, the interplay between the intrinsic and extrinsic factors would entail fulfilment of the roles and actions at micro, meso and macro levels, and communications and collaborations between them. Cultural integration arose as equally necessary to help the innovations to become well acclimatised to, firmly embedded in the local environment and evolve healthily and strongly, and further induce more fundamental changes. Finally, conceptual, methodological and practical implications were drawn from this study.