Quality Middle Schools


Book Description

Building on 20 years of careful research and real-world testing, the authors show administrators how to assess their schools' health. The goal is to improve middle schools by making sure the "culture" is right for all groups - students, teachers, staff. The authors call their measurement tools the Organizational Climate Description Questionnaire Revised for Middle Schools (OCDQ-RM), for tapping the openness of a school's professional interactions, and the Organizational Health Inventory for Middle Schools (OHI-M), for capturing the health of interpersonal relationships in schools. The OCDQ-RM (openness) questionnaire and the OHI-M (health) inventory are included in this book - ready to copy and administer. These measurements are user-friendly and easy to interpret; scoring directions are clearly explained. School leaders, especially superintendents and principals, can use these hands-on tools to understand what's going on in their schools and then make changes as necessary. Actual case studies show how using the questionnaires can help make every middle school a high-quality and positive learning environment.




The Psychology of School Climate


Book Description

Many people have become impatient with school reform and school improvement efforts that fail to include school climate. The importance of a positive school climate is emerging in current research, not only as an essential component of school reform and school improvement, but also as a necessary framework for maintaining excellent schools and providing healthy and safe schools for all students. Research strongly suggests that educators and policy makers have a lot to learn about the importance of school climate for school safety and academic success. With the growing body of research regarding school climate, it is important to study the research and understand how the psychology of school climate and how the elements of school climate can be viewed from a population-based perspective, as well as understanding the impact of school climate on individual students. This review of school climate research includes hundreds of articles and research papers of different perspectives from around the world in numerous cultures. School climate is becoming a science of education and psychology that must be studied further in order to understand the dynamic nature of learning environments, to identify elements that support or threaten the learning environment, and to learn how to improve the conditions for learning in all schools.




Research in Education


Book Description




Leadership and Organizational Outcomes


Book Description

This book focuses on the effect of leadership on organizational outcomes and summarizes the current research findings in the field. It addresses the need for inclusive and interpretive studies in the field in order to interpret leadership literature and suggest new pathways for further studies. Appropriately, a meta-analysis approach is used by the contributors to show the big picture to the researchers by analyzing and combining the findings from different independent studies. In particular, the editors compile various studies examining the relationship between the leadership and thirteen organizational outcomes separately. The philosophy behind this book is to direct future research and practices rather than addressing the limits of current studies.




Focus on the Wonder Years


Book Description

Young teens undergo multiple changes that seem to set them apart from other students. But do middle schools actually meet their special needs? The authors describe some of the challenges and offer ways to tackle them, such as reassessing the organization of grades K-12; specifically assisting the students most in need; finding ways to prevent disciplinary problems; and helping parents understand how they can help their children learn at home.