Education Commons^™

Ennobling Each Other Through Collaborative Inquiry: Exploring Music As A Provocation For Leadership Development, Ihan Ip

Dissertations

Amid the challenges in a global village, leadership education needs to surpass traditional methods, nurturing creativity, flexibility, and adaptability. This study is a collaborative action inquiry that considers music as an arts-based method in service of leadership development. The study unfolded over five cycles, in which 14 coinquirers collaborated in a process of exploration. The study illuminates the strong potential of music as a provocation for leadership development and reveals crucial realizations in the area of facilitation in collective processes.

This dissertation tells the story of the inquiry with the voices of its coinquirers and offers insights on facilitation through …

Better Together: From Siloed To Relational Organizational Design, Brooke Moore

The Dissertation in Practice at Western University

The impacts of historical inequities continue to limit access to quality outcomes for all learners in British Columbia. Organizational structures that separate and isolate efforts to create equity persist in BC school districts. Riverstone School District has attempted to disrupt the norm of siloed and discoordinated efforts by merging several central office support departments to offer increasingly wholistic and effective support to schools and the families they serve. However, despite the best intentions and despite now sharing physical space with one another, the departments have not yet merged effectively; isolated, conflicting efforts persist. This Organizational Improvement Plan (OIP) offers a …

Equity And Excellence: Creating A Socially Responsible Shared Vision Of Academic Quality, Amanda Skanes

The Dissertation in Practice at Western University

The concepts of academic quality and social responsibility in post-secondary organizations are spacious yet becoming more intertwined. With stated organizational values grounded in excellence and diversity, this Organizational Improvement Plan (OIP) seeks to intersect a quality management framework with the equity, diversity, and inclusion (EDI) efforts at a multi-campus college in Atlantic Canada. Specifically, the problem of practice I aim to resolve is how a shared vision of academic quality may be created through an added lens of social responsibility among the academic leadership team. In order to achieve a shared vision of academic quality, there are two main goals …

Collective Leadership Practices Improve Teacher Efficacy And School Culture, Vickie Stine

Education Projects

Experience has shown, and research correlates, teachers are the single most important school-related factor affecting student achievement. For students, the difference between having a quality teacher and having an incompetent teacher can exceed one grade-level equivalent in annual achievement growth (Hanushek et al.,1992). Shortages in the teaching force continue to increase nationwide, reaching crisis proportions. Challenges facing educators, including ever-changing needs of students, adjustments in education services, increased documentation requirements, lagging student outcomes, new initiatives, discipline concerns, and the expectation for teachers to perform to meet ever-increasing demands have resulted in disengagement of educators and decisions from them to leave …

South Carolina Elementary Teachers' Perceptions Of Principals' Transformational Leadership In Academically Recognized And Other, High Poverty Schools, Julian Lewis

All Dissertations

This study investigated selected elementary school teachers' perceptions of principals' leadership. Ten South Carolina schools were selected based on the criterion of 50% or higher poverty index. Five schools included the feature of recognition by the state for academic success for one year or more over the 2003-2006 timeframe. One hundred three elementary teachers and seven of the 10 schools' principals completed the Multifactor Leadership Questionnaire 5x-Short (Bass & Avolio, 1995a, 1995b). Given multiple data sources for this study, the question was formulated as follows: How are teacher and principal responses on the MLQ validated by principals' reports of leadership …