Catalogue Search | MBRL
Are you sure you want to remove the book from the shelf?
{{itemTitle}}
240,574
result(s) for
"School administration"
Sort by:
How Schools Meet Students' Needs
Meeting students' basic needs – including ensuring they have access to nutritious meals and a sense of belonging and connection to school – can positively influence students' academic performance. Recognizing this connection, schools provide resources in the form of school meals programs, school nurses, and school guidance counselors. However, these resources are not always available to students and are not always prioritized in school reform policies, which tend to focus more narrowly on academic learning. This book is about the balancing act that schools and their teachers undertake to respond to the social, emotional, and material needs of their students in the context of standardized testing and accountability policies. Drawing on conversations with teachers and classroom observations in two elementary schools, How Schools Meet Students' Needs explores the factors that both enable and constrain teachers in their efforts to meet students' needs and the consequences of how schools organize this work on teachers' labor and students' learning.
eBook
School-based obesity prevention for busy low-income families—Organisational and personal barriers and facilitators to implementation
Little research has targeted multiple-level barriers and facilitators in school-based parental support programmes. This qualitative study aims to describe barriers and facilitators, at organisational and personal levels, that teachers and parents in disadvantaged settings in Sweden perceived as influencing the implementation of the Healthy School Start II (HSS II) intervention.
Data collection, analysis and interpretation were guided by the Consolidated Framework for Implementation Research (CFIR). Focus groups and interviews were conducted with 14 parents and ten teachers within the HSS II trial. Data were analysed using qualitative content analysis in a deductive step using the three CFIR domains-inner and outer setting, and personal characteristics-followed by an inductive analysis.
The theme 'being on the same page-getting burdened teachers and parents to work on common ground' was found. Among teachers, barriers and facilitators were related to the structure of the schoolwork and curriculum, involvement from other staff and school management, the practical school workday, perception of high family needs but low parental interest, insufficient resources in the families, and teacher's personal knowledge, interests, and opinions about health and food. For parents, barriers and facilitators were related to the perceived family needs and resources, parents' health knowledge, consensus about healthy behaviours and ability to cooperate, and school involvement in health issues and the intervention.
Interventions should facilitate parents' and teachers' work on common ground, with activities suitable for a stressful and burdensome workday and everyday life. This could be achieved by integrating evidence-based practices within school routines, and including activities that are practicable despite parents' stressful lives, and that increase parental consensus about promoting health. Strategies to increase involvement of parents in families with high needs are necessary. Also, this study suggests an expansion of the CFIR to capture the interface between different micro-level organisations, and account for several delivering/receiving organisations.
Journal Article
The new work of educational leaders : changing leadership practice in an era of school reform
In The New Work of Educational Leaders, Peter Gronn provides a new framework for understanding leadership practice. The work of leaders will increasingly be shaped by three over-riding but contradictory themes: design, distribution and disengagement. These are the ′architecture′ of school and educational leadership. Designer-leadership is the use of mandatory standards of assessment and accreditation for school leaders, such as the NPQH (National Qualification for Headship) in the United Kingdon and the ISLLC (Interstate School Leaders Licensure Consortium) standards in the United States. Distributed patterns of leadership have developed in response to the intensification of school leaders′ work under policy regimes of site-based and school self-management. Disengagement describes a culture of abstention, in which school systems anticipate leadership succession problems, such as projected shortages and recurring recruitment difficulties.
eBook
School principals’ perceptions of autonomy and control in low-SES communities - navigating local school administration on the front line
In the decentralized Swedish school system, the local education authority (LEA) level has an important position when it comes to school governance. This article takes a micro-level perspective on principals’ perceptions of autonomy and control as they navigate local school administration in their front-line work in low – socio-economic status (SES) communities. The point of departure is taken in a multidimensional understanding of principal autonomy and street level bureaucracy. Empirical data consist of group conversations among principals, all of them working in a highly segregated Swedish city. The analysis shows that the principals perceive local school administration to be dominated by uniformity expressed through digitalization and specialization lacking contextual adaption. This orientation gives the principals a sense of local school administration being controlling and non-supportive. In addition, lack of adaption to the specific conditions of the low-SES community context tend to increase the principals’ workload and further restrict their autonomy. To cope with the situation and still deliver the education the students are entitled to, the principals act pragmatically in an innovative way. Based on contextual awareness they delay demands, deviate from routines and come up with alternative solutions, hence expanding their autonomy and intensifying their professional judgement.
Journal Article
A Behavior-Based Intervention That Prevents Sexual Assault: the Results of a Matched-Pairs, Cluster-Randomized Study in Nairobi, Kenya
Design
The study’s design was a cluster-randomized, matched-pairs, parallel trial of a behavior-based sexual assault prevention intervention in the informal settlements.
Methods
The participants were primary school girls aged 10–16. Classroom-based interventions for girls and boys were delivered by instructors from the same settlements, at the same time, over six 2-h sessions. The girls’ program had components of empowerment, gender relations, and self-defense. The boys’ program promotes healthy gender norms. The control arm of the study received a health and hygiene curriculum. The primary outcome was the rate of sexual assault in the prior 12 months at the cluster level (school level). Secondary outcomes included the generalized self-efficacy scale, the distribution of number of times victims were sexually assaulted in the prior period, skills used, disclosure rates, and distribution of perpetrators. Difference-in-differences estimates are reported with bootstrapped confidence intervals.
Results
Fourteen schools with 3147 girls from the intervention group and 14 schools with 2539 girls from the control group were included in the analysis. We estimate a 3.7 % decrease,
p
= 0.03 and 95 % CI = (0.4, 8.0), in risk of sexual assault in the intervention group due to the intervention (initially 7.3 % at baseline). We estimate an increase in mean generalized self-efficacy score of 0.19 (baseline average 3.1, on a 1–4 scale),
p
= 0.0004 and 95 % CI = (0.08, 0.39).
Interpretation
This innovative intervention that combined parallel training for young adolescent girls and boys in school settings showed significant reduction in the rate of sexual assault among girls in this population.
Journal Article