In this general introduction, I plan to outline selected scholarly work which has been completed by many of my colleagues and others and which has direct and indirect bearing on issues surrounding classroom management and discipline. This should also serve as the introduction to two articles by Dr. King and one by Dr. Singh which appear in this issue and relate to the topic being considered herein.

Over the years, teachers, teacher interns, parents and the general public have desired to access knowledge on classroom management and discipline. We hope the material presented in this issue of the Morning Watch will meet their wishes in this area at least to some degree.

A Reflective and Critical Focus in Teacher Education

For the last twenty years or so my colleagues in this Faculty have been researching and publishing in the area of teacher education. Recently, some of us have focused on the reflective and critical aspects of teacher education locally, especially in the area of the teacher internship. We have also extensively consulted with colleagues at the University of Hawai'i at Mnoa, and at some Australian universities, who are involved in reflective and critical teacher internship programs. Our intention has been to test results of our research, mostly produced in the form of "local knowledge" and "local theorizing", in comparative and international contexts. In order to do this, we have attended several conferences and presented papers based on our research. The response has been very positive, to say the least. We have been encouraged to continue our work and expand it in many other directions.

Drs. Wilf Martin, Ishmael Baksh, Clar Doyle, Bill Kennedy, Roy Kelleher, Alice Collins, Frank Cramm, Amarjit Singh and Len Williams have been researching and writing in the area of teacher internship and teacher education for several years. Lately, Drs. Barrie Barrell, Andrea Rose, Elisabeth Yeoman, and Dennis Mulcahy have been deeply involved in reflective and critical thinking in teacher education and internship. Professor Fred Hawksley carries out similar research in the area of drama education.

In our work with teacher interns we have discovered that the phobia of classrooms is rampant among teacher interns. Interns also struggle, individually and collectively, with dominant discourses in many other areas such as instruction, resources, the ability level of students, the purpose of internship programs, as well as the culture of school life. Teachers in general, cooperating teachers who work with the interns during the internship program, and university based professors/supervisors are no less concerned with the phenomenon of classroom management/discipline and with other areas in teacher education.

In recent research efforts involving the complex classroom situations that teaching interns encounter, we found that the interns themselves are often obsessed with the mastery of technical skills for instruction and classroom management (Singh, Doyle, Rose & Kennedy, 1997). However, without intending to underestimate their concern with the fear of classroom management, we pose in our other work some critical and reflective questions. These are: how can we, as teacher educators, wean interns away from a focus on technical skills toward a process where they can feel safe to try to put their own work into a wider social, cultural, and political context (Doyle, Kennedy, Ludlow, Rose & Kennedy, 1994; Kennedy, Doyle, Rose & Singh, 1993; Kennedy & Doyle, 1995; Singh, Doyle, Rose & Kennedy, 1996).

A few words on methodology may be in order. In all of our work on reflective and critical teacher internship and education, we have used the concepts of voice, local theories, cultural, capital, problematizing dominant discourses, sites, social interaction and reflection as pedagogical categories for the purpose of analysis. For the analysis purpose we have mostly used the framework of qualitative methodology in the sense that we support our claims by using a number of quotations from data collected during interviews and reflective sessions. Finally, in all our work, there is an attempt to enable the teacher interns, cooperating teachers, university professors/supervisors and students in the class to speak for themselves.

The Concept of Voice as a Pedagogical Category

This is not the place to discuss our theoretical and practical orientations in detail; these can be readily found in articles and documents which are referred to above. On the whole, however, it is clear that for the purpose of organizing material relevant to teacher education and internship, and material relevant to the specific topic of classroom management, discipline and school culture, all of us have predominantly relied on the voice as a pedagogical category. In our work we focus on the voices of students, the voices of teacher interns, the voices of cooperating teachers, the voices of university professors/supervisors, and the voices of teachers at large.

While a great deal has been written on voice as a pedagogical category, no attempt is made here to review the literature on this category. However, very briefly, it suffices to mention that the exercise of listening to the voices of teachers, teacher interns, students, cooperating teachers and supervisors in teacher education programs enables us to see what these occupational groups bring to the educational organizations functioning as complex systems. Their voices make us realize what forms of knowledge and culture these groups produce while interacting with one another. These groups then bring this shared knowledge to their classroom and other work settings, i.e., the schools and the university. In this situation, we believe the goal should be to make knowledge and production of knowledge less external and more germane to the world of each group of people, who must be able to express their understanding of the world. All parties involved in teacher education and internship programs must realize that they can collaborate with each other to transform aspects of their lived experiences, if necessary. But as our friend and colleague Clar Doyle (1993, p. 130) often reminds us, transformation works "in an analogous position to hegemony. Transformation, which should be allowed to seep through our institutions and relationships usually comes in small doses and usually happens over time. Transformation usually happens with gentle hands. Transformation usually happens through cultural production."

O'Neill (1976, p. 12) draws our attention to the function of the teacher when he states that "the function of the teacher is to challenge, arouse, interest, make anxious, give confidence, coordinate achievement, and encourage reflection." The notion of voice when used in this sense puts emphasis on building rather than enhancing, on producing rather than reproducing. We should also remind ourselves that in any educational setting all parties involved are simultaneously teachers and learners. We all, one way or the other, teach others and learn from others. Pedagogical intents are omnipresent in all sites or situations in many subtle ways.

Our orientation is that if teachers, especially the teacher interns, can produce "local knowledge" and "local theories" about classroom management in relationship to the larger debate in society about the so-called crisis in the classroom, they might be able to speak to their own classroom reality with more confidence. They could self-consciously reflect on their own construction of classroom reality and on their own transformation. This process in the end should lead to locally manufactured (produced) classroom practices, which promotes democracy and democratic living.

In the internship situation, it has been important for us that the supervisors and the interns reflect together and make the internship together. Therefore, in our work with the teacher interns, we have (Doyle, Kennedy, Rose & Singh) consciously resisted the idea of inviting "experts" on classroom management, control, discipline, professional lesson planners, who could tell the teacher interns how to go about managing classrooms. We have often sought a balance between students', teacher interns', voices and the voices of the "experts" who are readily willing to provide in-service training programs on classroom management organized by various professional agencies.

Local and Other Studies Using the Concept of Voice

After having said a few things on the notion of voice as a pedagogical category, I wish to draw the attention of readers of the Morning Watch to the work done by Martin, Baksh & Martin, Baksh & Singh, and Williams & Kelleher. All these authors have extensively used the notion of voice (students' perspectives) in their research. Many of their articles have been published in the Morning Watch.

My article in this issue entitled, "Voice of Teacher Interns and the Fear of Classroom Management" uses the concept of voice. The article in this issue by my colleague, Dr. Irvin King, who teaches in the College of Education, the University of Hawai'i at Mnoa, attests to the voice of an experienced teacher as it relates to the issue of discipline in the classroom.

In an attempt to balance subjective voices of teachers and teacher interns, Dr. King splits his article into two sections. In one section he voices his own experiences with classroom discipline and presents his personal perspective on it. In the second part of his paper, he presents an extensive review of research done by some of the well-known scholars in the area of classroom discipline and management.

The Morning Watch

Since 1972, members of this Faculty have published their work on various aspects of teacher education in the Morning Watch which is edited by Baksh and Singh. The articles which appeared in this local journal have been compiled in five different volumes (Singh & Baksh, 1977; Singh & Baksh, 1982; Singh & Baksh, 1991) and are readily available to teachers and students in this province. Copies of The Morning Watch should also be available to the libraries of many Canadian Universities. The readers of The Morning Watch may like to know that it no longer appears as "hard copy"; it is now available as an electronic journal on the Faculty's home page. This is in line with the many changes organizations are making in order to adopt to the larger cultural change taking place due to many factors (e.g., globalization, downsizing, etc.).

Series of Monographs

In a series of monographs, published by the Publication Committee, Faculty of Education, Memorial University of Newfoundland, Wilf Martin has documented the voices of students from the classroom. He summarized the main aspects of this research methodology and the findings of his research in his book entitled Voices From the Classroom (see Martin, 1985). Everybody involved in teacher education, especially teacher interns, will find a wealth of material in his book and monographs which will enable them to be effective teachers in the classroom. As demonstrated by Martin's research classroom management and disciplinary problems cannot be completely separated from the process of effective teaching, which should take into account the voices of students and the classroom culture.

In the Voices From the Classroom and in his other monographs, Martin focuses on such issues as school rules, homework, teachers' pets and classroom victims, student embarrassment, helpful, understanding, and cooperating teachers. In each of these major areas, he finds that students have identified themes that reflect the school/classroom cultures. For example, many students voice their concerns about being embarrassed by teachers. Martin highlights the causes of student embarrassment as voiced by students. In other contexts, students think that there are teachers who show "understanding" and "patience" when dealing with them. Then there are teachers who are "caring" and "respect" students. On the other hand, some teachers are "rude" and "ignorant", while others hold "grudges" and bestow "favours" on some students.

These categories have special meaning for students which are quite different from the meaning attached to these categories by teachers. This dissonance or discrepancy between students' and teachers' meaning has significant implications for classroom discipline and management. It is quite clear that if teachers' actions and behaviors are embarrassing students, then they will resist, deviate and misbehave in the class just to challenge teachers' authority. Martin's studies show that the consequences of student embarrassment are that students develop dislikes for teachers, they are afraid of teachers' actions, and they develop negative self-concepts. All these factors most likely have potential to contribute toward classroom management and disciplinary problems.

In a similar manner, Martin highlights other categories and provides deep insight into the school and the classroom cultures. Some other categories he focuses on are: amount of homework, distribution of homework, problems of uneven distribution, time preferences for homework, school rules, schools with no written rules, meaning of rules, misbehaviors and punishment, making and implementing rules, teachers' pet and classroom victims, teachers' attitudes toward students, criteria for categorizing students' academic performance, student behavior, family background, geographical location, gender, disliking students, nature of favours and mistreatments (expectations for student behavior, selection of students for activities, attention students receive, assessing students' performance), the consequences of class victims and others ("being left out", the marking process, discipline, disliking teachers, anticipating and empathy among students, disagreement with pets-victims phenomena), helpful, understanding and cooperative teachers, getting along with teachers, helpful teachers (the need for help, obstacles to helping, students blaming themselves), understanding and friendly teachers (understanding teachers, friendly teachers), help through encouragement and cooperation (nature of encouragement, reciprocal nature of encouragement), listening to students' point of view (the sensitivity of teachers, "teachers are never wrong", students need to be understood, the consequences of not being understood).

Baksh & Martin (1992), Martin and Baksh (1984) highlight many other aspects of the school and the classroom cultures. Their most recent book length monograph on school humour is full of insights which will enable teachers, teacher interns, and others to understand the complexities of everyday school life (Martin & Baksh, 1995). Two earlier monographs by Baksh and Singh (1979, 1980) document voices of teachers in small rural Newfoundland communities which provide useful insights for the teacher interns.

It is up to the teachers, supervisors, and other teacher interns to learn about these categories. Understanding the intricacies of the classroom and school cultures should enable all parties involved in educational process to modify their actions and behaviors toward students, which in turn should overcome some difficulties involved in classroom discipline and management.

Baksh, I.J. & Martin, W.B.W. (1992). Gender differences in students' perceptions of schooling. St. John's: Faculty of Education, Memorial University of Newfoundland.

Baksh, I.J. & Singh, A. (1980). Teachers' perceptions of teaching: A Newfoundland study. St. John's, Memorial University of Newfoundland.

Baksh, I.J. & Singh, A. (1979). The teacher in Newfoundland community. St. John's: Faculty of Education, Memorial University of Newfoundland.

Doyle, C., Kennedy, W., Ludlow, K., Rose, A. & Singh, A. (1994). Toward building a reflective and critical internship program (The RCIP Model): Theory and practice. St. John's: Faculty of Education, Memorial University of Newfoundland.

Doyle, C. (1993). Raising Curtains on Education. Westport, CT: Bergin & Garvey.

Kelleher, R.R. & Williams, L.E. (1988). Teaching internships in England: Student perspectives. St. John's: Faculty of Education, Memorial University of Newfoundland.

Kennedy, W. & Doyle, C. (1995). Perceptions of internship evaluation. St. John's: Faculty of Education, Memorial University of Newfoundland.

Kennedy, W., Doyle, C., Rose, A. & Singh, A. (1993). Teaching internship: A reflective practice, in Partnership of schools and institution of higher education in teacher development (eds.). Hoz, Ron & Silberstein, Mose, Beer-Sheva, Israel: Ben-Gurion University of the Negev Press.

Martin, W.B.W. & Baksh, I.J. (1995). School humour: Pedagogical and sociological considerations. St. John's: Faculty of Education, Memorial University of Newfoundland.

Martin, W.B.W. (1985). Voices from the classroom. St. John's: Creative Publishers, Newfoundland.

Martin, W.B.W. & Baksh, I.J. (1984). Student observations on school rules in Newfoundland and Labrador. St. John's: Faculty of Education, Memorial University of Newfoundland.

O'Neill, C. (1976). Drama guidelines. London: Heinemann Educational Books.

Singh, A., Doyle, C., Rose, A. & Kennedy, W. (1997). A reflective internship and the phobia of classroom management (forthcoming). Australian Journal of Education, Vol. 41, No. 2.

Singh, A., Doyle, C., Rose, A. & Kennedy, W. (1996). Collaborative research and the voices of seconded teachers as internship supervisors, The Morning Watch, Vol. 23, No. 3-4, Winter, pp. 65-79.

Singh, A. & Baksh, I.J. (1991) (Eds.). Dimensions of Newfoundland society and education, Vol. I & Vol. II. St. John's: Faculty of Education, Memorial University of Newfoundland.

Singh, A. & Baksh, I.J. (1982) (Eds.). Society and education in Newfoundland, Vol. 1 & Vol. 2. St. John's: Faculty of Education, Memorial University of Newfoundland.

Singh, A. & Baksh, I.J. (1977) (Eds.). Society, culture and schooling: Issues and analysis. St. John's: Faculty of Education, Memorial University of Newfoundland.

This paper is part of a larger study which focuses on reflective and critical aspects of teacher education and teacher internship programs (Doyle, Kennedy, Ludlow, Rose and Singh, 1994; Kennedy, Doyle, Rose and Singh, 1993; Singh, Doyle, Rose and Kennedy, 1997; Singh, Rose, Doyle and Kennedy, 1996).

In working with teacher interns during the internship semester, we found that some teacher interns were terribly concerned about the issues related to classroom discipline and management. They were spending a tremendous amount of energy and time worrying about these issues. This was stressful for some. Every day they seem to approach their classrooms preoccupied with a sense of fear which led them to believe that their students would do something uncontrollable. It seems that in some cases their fear bordered on phobia. We examined this phenomenon in a paper entitled, "Reflective Internship and the Phobia of Classroom Management" (Singh, Doyle, Rose and Kennedy, 1997). That paper describes the methodology, data collection procedures, concepts and theories we utilized in analyzing teacher interns' fear of classroom management and discipline.

There is no need to repeat the discussion of those items in this paper. Instead, this paper focuses on one need of the teacher interns which became clear while analyzing the "phobia" phenomenon. The fact was that the interns wanted to know "practical" things which would help them to manage classrooms. In a self-reflective manner they wanted to know what were the sources of their fear? What made them so fearful? What should they do to survive the Internship semester? What should not be done if teacher interns want to survive the Internship?

As internship supervisors, part of our effort was to bring the interns together for reflection. In the extended group reflective sessions (sometimes involving thirty interns and lasting for two full days), and in "mini" individual reflective sessions (involving one to two hours), we discovered another thing: in order to come to grips with their fear, some interns constantly criticized the theoretical nature of university courses and were critical of the university professors for not transmitting to them practical knowledge. This feeling, we realize, is often fostered by some cooperating teachers, as well as by many non-university individuals and some people within the university itself. When the interns were told that a good theory is more likely to be the best practical tool, they showed considerable doubt. Facing this, my colleagues and I were on many occasions tempted to subject them to a barrage of information on classroom management and discipline which has been readily available in professional journals and books, but we resisted that idea to some extent. It is not that we did not want them to know the professional literature available on this topic. In fact, on many occasions we referred them to the latest books and articles on the subject. When we did that, they often responded by saying that those things don't work anyway in real classroom situations. What is a real classroom situation, we asked? A real classroom situation is where some students or a majority of students don't do what you expect them to do and you don't know how to make them do those things. This was generally their answer.

So, from our own theoretical perspective, and in this particular context, we decided to encourage the teacher interns to voice their own concerns about classroom management and disciplines in reflective sessions and let them struggle with their own voices, as well as with the voices of their peers. In fact, we learned that this is what they wanted to do. They wanted to hear their own voices and the voices of their peers. And they relished the whole process very much. They felt empowered in the sense that they found solutions to many problems by themselves.

The critical and reflective question we pose is how can we, as teacher educators, wean interns away from a preoccupation with technical skills toward a process where they can feel safe to try to put their own work into practice in a wider social, cultural, and political context? We encouraged them to focus on what they do and don't do in their classrooms in a larger context and asked them to identify them. In this paper, then, I report what the interns say about the sources of their fear about classroom management and discipline, and what their do's or don'ts are.

We find it very interesting to compare teacher interns' responses to issues related to classroom management and discipline with the results of studies done by the professional social and behavioral scientists and presented in the second part of Dr. King's paper in this issue of The Morning Watch. Our colleague, Dr. King, summarizes the results of many studies as well as various models of the classroom management and discipline. It is not that hard to note, in many cases, similarities and dissimilarities between the interns' answers and the suggestions offered to teachers by the professional researchers regarding "do's" and "don'ts". Similarly, there are many commonalities between the interns' answers and suggestions made in a recent document produced by the Department of Education outlining policies on discipline in schools (1996).

What does this mean? We concur with many others in believing that there are many ways of knowing and there is always a loose fit between different ways of knowing. Nobody knows everything. Our knowledge about and of social phenomena is always partial and limited. There are no fixed authorities in an absolute sense. The role of "expert knowledge" to come to grips with complex social issues is perhaps very modest.

Further attention should be drawn to three forms of knowledge: commonsense knowledge ("amateur" theory), professional knowledge (scientific theory) and official or state knowledge (ideology). In order to be able to make sense of complex social and educational issues, each form of knowledge should be treated, more or less, equally in any plan of action. This attitude or belief toward knowledge, however, does acknowledge the utility of one form of knowledge over the other in a particular situation. In this sense it does not ignore the hierarchical nature of knowledge in unequal (stratified) societies.

We raise one final question: how do interns, more or less, end up saying and doing the things suggested by professional researchers? Is it that the interns have read books and articles written by professionals on their own? We really don't think so. Is it the case that professional knowledge is often used as a basis for their socialization at homes, in schools, in the work place, in media and in society at large? Is the professional knowledge hegemonic or overwhelming in this sense?

The institutions of higher learning, like the university, are involved in professional socialization of the teacher interns. Whether they realize it or not, their commonsense knowledge do seem to correspond to the professional knowledge, at least to some degree. Does this mean that we at the university do not teach anything of a practical nature to teacher interns, as some of them claim? Or is it that what we do at the university and in the Faculty of Education gets readily absorbed as commonsense knowledge, which in turn surfaces as "hidden curriculum" in the classroom interaction among professors, teachers and students? Or is it the case that commonsense, professional and official forms of knowledge overlap when we come to act on complex social policy issues? We believe the latter is the case. And it should be that way (Singh, 1991). Believe it or not, so we at university do teach students something of practical nature - by default or by design!

Below we present responses (voices) of the interns to the sources of fear about classroom management and discipline in the form of several practical points which they themselves have identified.

More Than 50 Sources of Phobia/Nature of Phobia

1. Students who don't pay attention.

2. Not totally confident in my ability to keep things under control.

3. The most anxiety comes from discipline problems.

4. I am used to silent classroom.

5. I am used to school when the teacher talked, no one else talked.

6. The kids that want to learn will get the abuse (i.e., they should be able to learn).

7. Kids do manage to be disruptive (no matter what you do).

8. To maintain control is the hard part.

9. Whether you can tell Jimmy to shut up and keep everybody else in tune.

10. How to keep them cooled down and what to do if they're not cooled down.

11. Want to learn how to be effective as a teacher.

12. What to do when things are really getting out of hand.

13. There's a lot of feelings involved in a lot of things... I have gone from being happy to ready to tear all my hair out.

14. It is a lack of respect for the teacher.

15. How to quiet them down.

16. How to make them do their work.

17. Classroom management.

18. Getting up there and actually having them listen to me.

19. I'm weak in the area of disciplining a student.

20. Grade eight students are hard to handle.

21. My first fear was that I would be put in a junior high school.

22. Teaching a wide variety of subjects, many of which I have little idea about.

23. The expectations that are built into education to teach junior high are the worst.

24. Fear that I might get thrown into a situation right out of university and right into a situation where it was going to be the hardest.

25. Adolescents do not know how to behave, how to act.

26. Don't want to experience teaching in junior high when I want to teach high school.

27. University is more idealistic. I fear that it does not prepare one for the real world situation.

28. Fear of being put off track in the classroom.

29. Fear of being disruptive four of five times a period.

30. Fear of being able to get back and to get our thoughts back on the right track after you have been disrupted several times.

31. Fear concerning not being able to take care of practical matters.

32. Classes are so big and a lot of kids don't want to learn.

33. Fear of being inadequately trained to deal with disciplinary problems in the classroom.

34. Students wandering around in the classroom.

35. Fear of cooperating teacher sometimes coming down a bit too hard.

36. Worry about confrontational aspects of classroom management.

37. Fear that I wasn't doing something right.

38. Fear of getting things done in light of disruptive behavior.

39. Fear that students may not be working to your particular teaching strategy.

40. Worry about what to do if things are really getting out of hand in the classroom.

41. Concern with how to face different techniques of control in the teaching situation.

42. Fear of not being able to establish yourself as a teacher.

43. Fear of not being able to get used to good and bad days of behavior in the classroom.

44. Concern with situation, specific discipline problems.

45. Fear of taking things too personally.

46. Fear of not being able to control my anger or stop being angry.

47. Concern with how to learn to appear angry without being angry, to put that face on you.

48. Fear of being or getting overly frustrated.

49. Worry about finding an appropriate discipline method that's going to work.

50. Fear of not being able to see myself as a professional teacher.

51. Fear of going up in front of adolescents, fear of not having confidence to stand up in front of students.

52. Fear of not being able to earn respect of students.

53. Fear of dealing with today's young kids because they seem to be so different.

54. Was anxious because it was my first class.

55. I found it quite frustrating dealing with my cooperative teacher. I never knew what she wanted.

56. My only fear was not being prepared.

57. My fear was not being able to find any equipment (e.g., audiovisual material) in the school.

More Than 180 Things Teacher Interns Should Do to Survive the Internship

Do's

1. Build a rapport with students.

2. Establish yourself as a teacher.

3. Be fair.

4. Don't give tests with bonus questions on them.

5. Be enthused or pretend you are enthused.

6. Think about incentives.

7. Use different types of incentives.

8. Sometimes learn to turn a blind eye to a lot of things.

9. Save your breath for something serious.

10. Try and establish a positive relationship with students.

11. Be flexible.

12. Be confident even when you are not.

13. Maintain energy.

14. Leave your preconceived notions behind you.

15. See what you can see.

16. See what the school has to offer.

17. Be open-minded.

18. Try and get an early gauge about your students ability.

19. Do what you are told (by others in the school).

20. Mould yourself to the situation.

21. Get along.

22. Be considerate.

23. Don't fight.

24. Take care of yourself physically and emotionally.

25. Take time for yourself.

26. Cool off before you have to deal with a problem.

27. Have a sense of humour.

28. Be friendly.

29. Take it easy in the school where you are welcomed.

30. Remember you are not working in the school, you are an intern.

31. You are more or less a guest in the school.

32. Get to know the students.

33. Get to know the staff.

34. Get involved with the guidance counsellor.

35. Talk to the guidance counsellor about the things to look for in children who have been abused.

36. Do get to know the kids.

37. Do get to know your co-op teacher.

38. Do get to know your principal.

39. Take the kids aside if you want to discipline them.

40. Take the good things from school home with you and talk about them to everyone you meet.

41. Tell everyone that you are proud of your kids at school.

42. Tell the kids that you are proud of them.

43. Be as understanding as possible.

44. Do try and work with resource people in the community as well as with parents.

45. Provide the best education for the children.

46. Try to make your classes as much fun as possible.

47. Make your class have as much variety in it as possible.

48. I should always try to be fair.

49. Always be thinking about do's and don'ts all term.

50. Take it (bad things in classrooms) with a grain of salt and start off fresh on another day.

51. You should try to relate it (the textbook) to outside things or use other different resources.

52. Use other textbooks as supplements because there's interesting stuff in them.

53. Any way you can avoid becoming attached to students, avoid it.

54. Get to know the other interns for sure, because we are all in the same boat.

55. Talking to others helps relieve some of the pressure.

56. Get things out of yourself.

57. Get to know all the teachers other than your cooperative teacher -- as many teachers as you can.

58. Use other teachers as resource persons.

59. Try to get a variety of opinions in the school.

60. Try to become involved with them (students) outside of the classroom.

61. Try to get involved in extracurricular activities and stuff like that.

62. Treat everyone fairly, even boys and girls.

63. Be relaxed.

64. Be yourself in front of the classroom.

65. Be patient with them (students).

66. Be understanding.

67. Make an effort to be understanding.

68. You get as much out of it as you put into it.

69. You have to put a lot of effort into it.

70. You have to make that extra effort to know their (students) environment which is all new to you.

71. Extra effort to be nice to them, know your purpose and place in the school.

72. Make an effort.

73. Set up a plan to talk to your cooperative teacher once a week.

74. Prepare everything before hand.

75. Do suck up.

76. Do everything that is asked of you and do more.

77. Find out all the information that's available to you.

78. Find out exactly what courses you're required to teach.

79. Find out exactly what the book's going to be.

80. Find out exactly how your cooperative teacher teaches.

81. Find out how to duplicate your cooperative's teaching and add a few of your own ideas in there.

82. Stay around in school after 3:00 p.m. for 20 minutes.

83. Go to school early in the morning.

84. Make sure you're in class on time.

85. It is not good for you and it's not a good impression on the kids to be late.

86. Be responsible.

87. Do everything humanly possible to make yourself an effective teacher.

88. Make sure how the school works.

89. Make sure you know who's in the school, what their function is, what you need to do, what you need to know, how do you get around things, how do you get information, whom to contact, who the resource people are, where all the duplicating materials are, and what available resources are in the school itself.

90. Must consider yourself a teacher.

91. Take some of the responsibility in the classroom.

92. You got to be firm and friendly.

93. You got to get involved in order to be a part of the staff.

94. You got to go around.

95. Make yourself accessible to the staff and be friendly and say "Hi" to this person and "Hi" to that person.

96. Make yourself speak to the people.

97. Get involved, that's one big thing.

98. Get involved during lunch time, if not in extracurricular activities.

99. Eat your lunch in the staff room and then go out with the students.

100. Make sure everybody gets to know you.

101. Get on a one-to-one basis with people.

102. Remember you're in school to learn.

103. Go through the gradual process to learn about your classroom and the school.

104. Slowly increase your role in what you do.

105. Remember, students are going to watch what you are doing.

106. Yes, go there (in the classroom) with an open mind.

107. Take each day as a new experience.

108. Go home and chatter with your friends and laugh and joke about what happened in the school.

109. You have to be able to accept criticism.

110. Put up with a bit of chatter in your classroom.

111. Sometimes you have to yell and talk loud.

112. Got to raise your voice every so often.

113. Be louder than them (students).

114. Dealing with students one-on-one (style of keeping control) works.

115. Take their privileges away from them. It is quite effective, e.g., computer time, gym time, etc.).

116. Have a lot of energy.

117. Move around in the classroom.

118. Use proximity control, i.e., move near students.

119. Be assertive.

120. Make your presence known in the classroom.

121. Be confident of yourself.

122. Pure silence works.

123. Use verbal and non-verbal cues to gain control.

124. Learn to appear angry without being angry.

125. Be calm.

126. Have patience.

127. Learn to deal with your frustrations.

128. Experiment with different techniques to get your ideas across or in maintaining control.

129. Use detention not too frequently. It doesn't work.

130. Think of yourself as a professional teacher.

131. Learn from trial and error.

132. Talk to other teachers.

133. Just try to talk to the students.

134. Just try to understand the students.

135. Get to know why students do what they do.

136. Slow down and write neater on the board.

137. Try to interact more with the students.

138. Ask the students more questions.

139. Remember words that are simple to you may blow students away.

140. Lay down the rules.

141. Try to earn respect of students.

142. Remember, respect is earned.

143. Get used to the juggling act, to deal with disruptive kids and get through your lesson is a real juggling act.

144. Lesson management is necessary, it leads to classroom management.

145. Be prepared to be a counsellor at times.

146. Just stand there, and look at students and be quiet.

147. Pinpoint the student with whom you are having a problem.

148. Learn to deal with students one-on-one for keeping control.

149. Make the class think that everyone is responsible for each others actions.

150. Forcing students to leave the room sparingly (occasionally.)

151. Think twice before you ask a student to leave your class. Remember, there will be days you will have good control and days when control will be bad.

152. Remember you are new in the classroom and the students will try you out and how they can challenge your authority as a teacher.

153. Learn to deal with classroom problems on your own.

154. Follow the proper procedures.

155. Get along with or have no trouble with the principal, the staff, the parents and the students.

156. Do your own self judgement and evaluation as to the severity of discipline problems before getting help from higher authorities.

157. Get students to admit to you that they're wrong, get them to tell you what their punishment should be and get them to tell you what they deserve and then deal with it.

158. Prepare your lesson well, doubly well.

159. Make an extra effort to find the material and equipment you need for your classroom, i.e., do good planning. Everything is planning.

160. Remember that some days students are not in the learning mode and nothing will work to calm them down.

161. Remember there's got to be a way to quieten down a particular student.

162. Talk to other teachers about a particular student you have problems with, get to know his family background.

163. Remember, that in many cases, potential dropouts are your problem students.

164. Potential dropouts are very disruptive.

165. Let potential dropouts have their little chit chat sometimes and get it over with.

166. Be a little bit more lenient with the potential dropout students, a little bit more lenient.

167. Remember if you threaten your students (dropouts potentially), a wall goes up, and then it is a fight, then you got a fight on your hands.

168. Give students multiple choice questions if they have problems with writing and reading. Sometimes make them write a bit but never threaten them.

169. Get yourself organized enough to answer questions that might be posed to you in different situations and to face those kinds of challenges.

170. Always address individual needs of students.

171. Handle the class by relating to students on an individual basis -- giving as much of yourself as you think is necessary.

172. Feel positive in the way you relate to students, to the whole class.

173. Present yourself in terms of your humour, use humour to make students relax in your class.

174. Create a good learning environment, one that's not overly stressful and that's not full of emotional problems in any way.

175. Make an environment that makes people feel comfortable and in which students can work.

176. Make your class as a game, as a place to have fun. Remember, too much education is boring and that's why we get so many disciplinary problems.

177. Remember some students are bored in the classroom and they don't want to be in it.

178. Remember that discipline problems stem from poor teaching.

179. Try to get students to do things themselves for the sake of getting out of school.

180. Remember students can put you on the spot in front of others.

181. Observe your cooperating teacher and learn techniques of classroom control from them.

182. Ask your students to make important decisions.

183. Ask students questions.

184. Ask your students to provide reasons for their actions.

185. Ask your students for future plans.

186. Be more conciliatory and adopt a democratic approach to teaching, where students have to think through reasoning.

187. Ask your students "what is the problem" if she/he is giving you trouble.

188. Let students know where you are coming from.

189. You have to look for yourself.

About 70 Things Teachers Should Not Do to Survive the Internship

Don'ts

1. Don't give tests with bonus points on them.

2. Don't be yourself right away, wait.

3. Don't be fake.

4. Don't freak out if somebody disobeyed or did something.

5. Don't take things personally.

6. Don't get frustrated easily.

7. Don't expect to get everything right all the time.

8. Don't waste your breath on everything.

9. Don't speak to students everyday for some minor infractions.

10. Don't be judgemental or don't be judgemental at all.

11. Don't try to change the situation right away because you can't change it.

12. Don't enter into one-to-one confrontations with students in a classroom environment.

13. Don't open your mouth unless you know what you are saying.

14. Don't speak before you act.

15. Don't get too stressed.

16. Don't push yourself beyond your own physical limits.

17. Don't ignore your own needs.

18. Don't question the principal.

19. Don't' make the principal look bad in front of the staff.

20. Don't reprimand or discipline kids in front of the whole class.

21. Don't take your problems home with you.

22. Don't put down other teachers or other students around the kids.

23. Don't forget that you're supposed to be a role model.

24. Don't forget that the kids are going through a lot more than just what you see everyday in school.

25. Try not to show your anger because if you do the students just play on it.

26. You don't want to try to be buddy buddy with the kids because they'll walk all over you.

27. You shouldn't get too upset if there's talking in your class because it is going to be there, so don't worry about it.

28. Don't expect a whole lot from kids at first until you get to realize their achievement.

29. Student interns shouldn't be too upset if they have a bad day because it's going to happen, probably more than once.

30. Try not to stick with the textbook a whole lot.

31. Don't become too attached to people and things in school. Don't become attached over everything.

32. Never yell.

33. Never embarrass a student.

34. Never take them out or draw attention to them.

35. Remember it is the cooperative teacher's class after all.

36. Don't try to take total control of it (classroom.)

37. Never override the cooperative teacher.

38. Don't argue with your cooperative teacher.

39. Don't run out of school at 3:00 p.m.

40. Don't be late in the class.

41. Don't depend on the cooperative teacher all the time.

42. Don't be shy even if you are shy.

43. Don't go into your classroom and rule with an iron fist as such!

44. Don't just sit down and be a passive observer.

45. Don't forget that students are going to look at you as a teacher.

46. Don't forget that you are going to be the role model for them (student).

47. Don't let things bother you.

48. Don't take today's things home, forget about it.

49. Don't keep bringing your day-to-day problems in with you and...

50. Don't take your problems home with you.

51. Don't be afraid to accept constructive criticism you know.

52. Don't be afraid to ask your cooperative teacher "is there anything I am doing wrong"?

53. Don't take students behavior personally.

54. Don't get angry.

55. Don't get overly frustrated if the class is not getting what you are saying.

56. Never assume that the students know everything.

57. Don't try to build Rome in one day. Remember it wasn't built in a day.

58. Make kids stay after the class today.

59. For something that happened on Friday or yesterday.

60. Even detention doesn't work.

61. Don't force students to leave the class excessively. It doesn't serve the purpose.

62. Don't be too lenient to students.

63. Don't be unprepared for your classroom.

64. Don't think you can handle the students everyday.

65. Don't single out one student in the class and never do that in front of his peers, i.e., scream at them.

66. Don't argue with the potential dropout students back and forth.

67. Don't threaten your students as a person, i.e., threaten their person.

68. Don't use games everyday.

Department of Education (1996). Programming for individual needs: Policy, guidelines and resource guide on discipline, school violence and safe school teams. St. John's: Government of Newfoundland and Labrador, Division of Student Support Services.

Doyle, C., Kennedy, W., Ludlow, K., Rose, A. & Singh, A. (1994). Toward building a reflective and critical internship program (The RCIP Model): Theory and practice. St. John's: Faculty of Education, Memorial University of Newfoundland.

Kennedy, W., Doyle, C., Rose, A. & Singh, A. (1993). Teaching internship: A reflective practice, in Partnership of schools and institution of higher education in teacher development (eds.). Hoz, Ron & Silberstein, Mose. Beer-Sheva, Israel: Ben-Gurion University of the Negev Press.

Singh, A., Doyle, C., Rose, A. & Kennedy, W. (1996). Collaborative research and the voices of seconded teachers as internship supervisors, The Morning Watch, Vol. 23, No. 3-4, Winter, pp. 65-79.

Singh, A., Doyle, C., Rose, A. & Kennedy, W. (1997). A reflective internship and the phobia of classroom management (forthcoming). Australian Journal of Education, Vol. 41, No. 2.

Teaching is one of the most important jobs in our society, yet teachers are often overworked, underpaid, and under appreciated. There is a common bond which unites all teachers, and this is the desire to help our students reach their maximum potentials as human beings. When we achieve this goal, when we see students grow as a result of our teaching, we know that all the training and hard work have been worth the effort. Unfortunately, the realization of this goal is sometimes thwarted by the attitudes and misbehavior of students.

The purpose of this paper is to provide a framework for analyzing and assessing the many facets of student misbehavior in the schools. It consists of two parts. Part I contains a chronological narrative describing the evolution of my thinking about discipline; I think it provides a realistic and sober assessment of discipline in the schools. Part II consists of a fairly comprehensive outline of those ideas which I think have made a significant or relevant contribution to the discussion about discipline in our schools. It provides some specific and practical suggestions for improving teaching effectiveness. Hopefully, the reader can use some of the ideas to reflect upon as potential strategies to improve teaching.

The Beginning

I began my teaching career in California in 1961 as a high school mathematics teacher. It was a great time to be a teacher for, although some students were not highly motivated to learn, there was still a general respect for most teachers. I would estimate that fewer than ten percent of all teachers had serious discipline problems in those days. I believe this was because teachers had real authority over what happened at school, and this authority translated into calm and orderly classrooms. To illustrate how this authority worked, let me describe an incident which occurred on the first day of school in 1963.

The bell rang, and Fred entered my room and sat in the last row of seats near the door. After taking roll, I started explaining my expectations for the class. "Big deal!" muttered Fred, just loud enough to be heard across the classroom. I looked in his direction, made firm eye contact with him, and warned the entire class that I would not tolerate any further disrespect. Minutes later, in response to one of my comments, Fred muttered "Jee-sus Kee-ryste!" I immediately stopped instruction, scribbled a note to the principal on a piece of paper, and instructed Fred to take the note to the office. Which he did. After school, I found a note from the principal in my mailbox. I met with the principal and he asked me to readmit Fred into my class. "If Fred gets away with this," I explained, "it will be open season on me for the rest of the year." The principal stood behind me, and Fred was not readmitted to my class, and, as a result, I had a very good year with my students.

That's the way it was in the early 1960s; the teacher had authority, and because of this, there were few discipline problems. Today, many educators probably think that I was too harsh with Fred, that I should have given him another chance. I disagree.

In 1966 I left the classroom to attend graduate school. After three years of study, I received my doctorate degree and was hired by the College of Education at the University of Hawaii where I ran a number of research and curriculum projects. After sitting behind a desk for eleven years in that position, I decided to switch to the Division of Field Services where I served as a college coordinator supervising student teachers. Thus, when I entered my first classroom to observe a student teacher in 1980, it had been fourteen years since I had been in a regular public school classroom. And boy, was I in for a big surprise!

The Rude Awakening

I was assigned student teachers at almost every grade level from kindergarten through the twelfth grade in my first year of supervising student teachers, and in classroom after classroom I saw rude and disrespectful student behavior. In a third-grade classroom, children would not cooperate or obey the simplest of commands. The teacher had four time-out locations in the room where she sent disobedient children, but she needed many more. In an intermediate school Physical Education class, I witnessed students slap the student teacher on the back of the head at the beginning of each period. When I asked him why he permitted this, he pretended he was unaware of it. In a high school English class, a glassy-eyed boy, wreaking of alcohol, arrived ten minutes tardy. When the student teacher moved towards her desk to mark the attendance book, the boy kicked over a desk and shouted obscenities at her. And so it went.

To be sure, there were classrooms in which students were orderly and attentive. Even so, I would estimate that fewer than ten percent of the teachers were without discipline problems. Teachers had lost their authority, and teaching had become a very stressful occupation.

For a number of years I tried to find someone to blame for these conditions. At first I blamed teachers for not cracking down on students. Then I blamed principals for not backing teachers when they referred students to the office. Then I blamed the Board of Education and the State Legislature for enacting legislation and rules which granted rights to students which made it difficult to maintain order in the schools. Then parents for not raising their children properly. Then Education professors for ignoring the discipline problems in the schools. Finally, I realized it did little good to place blame: everyone, including myself, was to blame. The situation in the schools was very complicated. And so I decided to study the problem.

Looking for Solutions

The student teachers I supervised had been exposed to three approaches to discipline: Discipline Without Tears (Dreikurs and Cassel, 1972), T. E. T. : Teacher Effectiveness Training (Gordon, 1974), and Schools Without Failure (Glasser, 1969). Each of these approaches might be described as student centered in that they are based on the belief that students will behave if they are treated humanely. However, I observed that students frequently (indeed, usually) took advantage of teachers who tried to be kind and democratic; it was usually the strict teachers who had control of their classes. Of course, I must admit that many teachers who tried to be strict were also suffering from serious student misbehavior.

In 1983 I had a stroke of good fortune. I supervised two student teachers in the same school, one in English and the other in Health and the same seventh grade students were in both classes. On my first visit to the school both classes were still in the hands of the regular classroom teacher. In the English class, the students were rowdy, used four-letter words, and generally sabotaged the efforts of the teacher. The following period I visited those same students in a Health class, and to my surprise, they were polite and respectful of the teacher. I asked the Health teacher for an explanation of his success with students. He had no secret system, he assured me, he was just being himself. He simply refused to let students misbehave because it was his job to teach them to be polite and considerate of other people, including the teacher. Although this did not provide me with a system which I could share with other teachers, it did show me that teachers can and do make a tremendous difference in how students behave. There was hope.

During my travels about the schools I had come across a small number of teachers who were consistently outstanding in developing polite and productive students. I decided to revisit these teachers in search of answers, and I videotaped each of them in the hopes of discovering their common techniques. At first glance, the outstanding teachers were different from one another: Some were loud and aggressive, others were quiet; some were large, others were small; some were friendly, some were cool and distant; some appeared democratic, others authoritarian; some were Caucasian, others were Oriental. Yet as different as they were, they all had very cooperative students. But why? I could see no common thread.

Gradually, the interplay of my classroom experiences and my reading began to reveal some common characteristics of these effective teachers. From the works of Canter and Canter (1976, 1989) I came to realize that effective teachers were assertive teachers who believed it was their job to teach values and who insisted upon polite behavior. From the works of Charles (1981) I learned that effective teachers prevented most problems through their planning and organization. From Jones (1987) I learned that effective teachers used body language, especially their facial expressions, to convey that they meant business when confronting student misconduct of any kind. From French and Raven (1960) I learned that teachers gain the cooperation of students through the exercise of five different forms of power. And from Harry and Rosemary Wong (1991) I realized that effective teachers set the proper tone in the first few minutes and days of the school year.

There was, after all, some common characteristics of effective teachers. In the remainder of this paper I shall share with you what I consider to be some of the more useful ideas I have discovered about discipline in the schools.

The Issue of Who is in Charge

Table 1 presents a continuum along which are placed some of the leading theorists on classroom discipline (adapted from Tauber, 1995). The descriptors at each end of the continuum are self-explanatory: To the right are theories which believe the teacher must exert control in the classroom, and to the left are theories which believe students can manage themselves if given the chance. Most teachers fall somewhere between the two extremes. However, I think it is a mistake for teachers to think of themselves as being in a fixed spot on the continuum. The most effective teachers I know adjust their management style to fit the situation. For example, a friend

of mine, Alfred, has a group of Advanced Placement Calculus students with whom he is a very student centered teacher. They are bright and highly motivated, and Alfred gives them a great deal of freedom. He can afford to ignore an occasional transgression, and even smile at it, because he knows the students will get back on task. During another period, Alfred has a group of Pre-Algebra students with whom he is a highly teacher centered teacher. Experience has taught him that he must provide them with strict guidelines and constant surveillance. If he smiles at a minor transgression, students frequently perceive this as weakness or approval, and things worsen. Alfred does not prefer being strict, but he has found this is the most effective way to handle the group. Hence, a teacher's position on the continuum is not fixed and can vary depending on the maturity of the students. A teacher's position on the continuum can even change with the same group of students during the school year.

I believe a teacher should start the school year being highly teacher centered. As the year progresses, and as students demonstrate their maturity, the teacher can slowly relinquish more and more control to them. Perhaps you have heard the old saying "Don't smile until Thanksgiving." I do not personally follow this advice, for I smile and laugh throughout the year. There is, nonetheless, a bit of wisdom in the saying. It is based upon the knowledge that if you begin the year by being in tight control of the class, you can gradually relinquish control and establish a student centered classroom. However, if you begin the year by being permissive and letting students dictate the mood of the classroom, and if things get out of control, it is extremely difficult to regain control of the classroom. This means it is possible to go from the right to the left on the discipline continuum as the year progresses, but it is difficult to go from the left to right.

The authors with whom I agree the most, authors such as Jones, the Wongs, and the Canters, fall towards the teacher centered side of the continuum. These authors have their roots in the classroom and I find their ideas about teaching to be the most practical. Those authors who fall on the student centered end of the continuum, men such as Glasser, Gordon, and Dreikurs, are psychologists or psychiatrists who have their roots in private practice dealing with individuals rather than large groups of children. For the most part, I find their ideas to be idealistic and less applicable to the real world of kids in classrooms. An example will illustrate the differences between the two positions.

Dreikurs and Cassel (1972) recommend that the teacher ignore a student who is misbehaving to get attention. They reason that by responding to the misbehavior, the teacher is unwittingly giving the student what he wants, attention, thus reinforcing the bad behavior and increasing the likelihood that the behavior will be repeated. Jones (1987) points out that this might work with a child at home, but it backfires on the teacher in the classroom with 25 other students. If a teacher ignores a student's blatant misbehavior, these students will get the idea that they can do the same thing. And so, instead of extinguishing the misbehavior of one student, by ignoring the infraction the teacher is reinforcing the notion, in the minds of 25 other students, that misbehavior will be tolerated by the teacher. And things will get worse. My experiences tell me that Jones is right.

The Three Faces of Discipline

Charles (1981; 1985) has defined three faces of classroom discipline which provide a useful framework for examining discipline. Preventive discipline are those things a teacher does to prevent student misconduct. Supportive discipline consists of the techniques the teacher uses to help students maintain self-control and to get back on track when they start to misbehave. Corrective discipline consists of the consequences or punishment a teacher administers following student misbehavior. In the following pages, I shall indicate how the leading theories of discipline fit into this framework.

As they read this, teachers might think about developing their own written discipline plan. Using the headings of preventive discipline, supportive discipline, and corrective discipline, they might select ideas for each category which are consistent with their personality and outlook on schooling, keeping in mind that there is no right or wrong approach to discipline. If something works for them, they should use it.

Preventive Discipline. Preventive discipline consists primarily of those things a teacher does before students enter the room. Jones (1987), Emmer and Everton (1984), and Sprick (1985) emphasize the importance of classroom structure, and this topic is a major component of preventive discipline. Structure refers to a broad range of topics from the arrangement of the furniture in the room on the one hand to how teachers plan and teach their classroom rules and procedures on the other. It includes room arrangement, walls and bulletin boards, storage space and supplies, teaching style, rules and procedures, the content of the curriculum, the teachers' uniqueness as a person, their skills in motivating student interest, lesson plans, and their own physical and mental preparation are all vitally important parts of their preparation for teaching. Structure provides a framework for everything that happens in the room. According to Jones, "Adequate structure is the cheapest form of behavioral management, since once you establish a routine you can produce needed cooperation and rule-following thereafter at relatively little effort." (1987, p. 41)

If students clearly understand the rules, routines, and standards for the class, student misconduct can be minimized. Jones (1987) believes classroom discipline problems can almost always be traced, at least in part, to inadequate structure. Therefore, it is important that teachers plan a clearly defined classroom structure before the students arrive. Many authors, including Chernow and Chernow (1981), Emmer and Everton (1984), the Wongs (1991), and Sprick (1985) agree with Jones that classroom rules and procedures must be clearly taught on the first day of school and retaught throughout the school year.

The Wongs (1991) provide a wealth of suggestions for improving a teacher's preventive discipline arsenal. Their approach emphasizes the positive: having positive expectations, helping students experience success, inviting students to learn, dressing for success, and being mentally prepared for teaching. They also provide many practical suggestions, such as how to take roll, how to keep a grade book, and how to introduce oneself to the class.

There is more to preventive discipline than being organized and prepared. Jones (1987, p. 8) defines classroom discipline as "the business of enforcing classroom standards and building patterns of cooperation in order to maximize learning and minimize disruptions." Hence, discipline is a two-edged sword: on one edge is enforcing standards, on the other is gaining the cooperating of your students. Jones believes cooperation to be the more important of the two. But how do we get cooperation? How do we get students to do what we want them to do?

An understanding of the difference between authority and power can be very useful in gaining student cooperation (Froyen, 1988 ). Authority is the right to decide what happens in the classroom. The teacher is granted that authority by the school board. Power, on the other hand, is teachers' ability to get students to do what they want them to do. While all teachers are vested with authority, not all teachers have power. There are five forms of power that can be used to get an individual to act in ways the teacher deems appropriate: legitimate power; coercive power; reward power; attractive power; and expert power (French & Raven, 1959; Froyen, 1988; Shrigley, 1986).

To some extent, teachers have always had legitimate power. This power emanates from the students' belief that the teacher has the right to determine what happens in the classroom. Students behave because they recognize and accept the right of the teacher to be in charge. To a large extent it was legitimate power which enabled me to remove Fred from my class in 1963. The students, as well as the administrators, acknowledged the legitimate power of the teacher. While teachers still have legitimate power, in recent years many forces are eroding this form of power.

In the past, teachers usually combined their legitimate power with coercive power, the threat and use of punishment to gain student cooperation. In today's schools, the continued use of coercive power, especially in the absence of other forms of power, alienates students and often has detrimental side effects. Nonetheless, coercive power has a legitimate role in the classroom, and when used in conjunction with other forms of power, can contribute to a productive classroom.

Teachers can also use reward power. In this case, students behave in anticipation of receiving some kind of reward from the teacher. The outline in Part II below lists many types of rewards, but recognition, praise, and appreciation are probably the most effective rewards a teacher can give, especially if the teacher is also using attractive power.

Attractive, or referent power is relationship power, the power teachers have because they are likable and know how to develop good relationships with students. Teachers who rely upon attractive power go out of their way to make students feel good about themselves, and they work hard at developing good relationships with all students. I know of teachers who proudly state that they do not care if their students like them so long as they respect them. To some extent this attitude is based upon the belief that popular teachers buy the good will of their students by being lenient with them. But this need not be the case. Many popular teachers are strict; yet, at the same time, they treat students in a friendly and respectful manner, they make their classes as interesting as possible, and they try to make every student feel a part of the class. Such teachers are both liked and respected, and they wield a great deal of power with students.

The final type of power identified by French and Raven (1960) is expert power, the power teachers have because they possess superior knowledge. Teachers who rely upon expert power take pride in their command of the subject matter, are enthusiastic about the subject, prepare interesting lessons, and derive great pleasure in transmitting this enthusiasm and knowledge to their students. When students respect the teacher for the knowledge she possesses, when they master significant knowledge and skills, and when they feel good about themselves because they are achieving, they are less likely to misbehave.

A generation ago, when I began my teaching career, a teacher could reply upon legitimate power, supported with coercive power, to maintain control in the classroom. This will not work in most classrooms today: many students do not automatically respect their teachers, and the arsenal of available punishments is so small and ineffectual that the most disruptive students are unafraid. Therefore, all teachers would be well-advised to develop other sources of power. By consciously developing and combining various forms of power, a teacher can geometrically increase his or her influence with students (Fairholm & Fairholm, 1984). If a teacher is liked by students (attractive power), is admired for his knowledge of the subject (expert power), and gives authentic praise to his students (reward power), then the teacher truly has power to influence learning in the classroom. The challenge to any teacher is to find that combination of power which is compatible with his or her basic beliefs, abilities, and personality.

Jones (1987) has also made a significant contribution to the discussion of power in the classroom. In a sense, his discussion of power is more relevant to teachers than are the other theories, for he deals with the most common of classroom experiences, confrontations between student and teacher. In such situations, the person who get his way wields the power. Many authors are uncomfortable discussing confrontation, and some recommend that teachers withdraw from power struggles (e.g., Dreikurs and Cassel, 1972). Jones does not. He suggests that the teacher use gentle yet firm techniques (which he refers to as "limit setting") which enables the teacher to prevail in interpersonal power struggles between student and teacher. I refer to this as personal power, and it will be discussed more fully in the next section of this paper.

No discussion of preventive discipline would be complete without discussing the importance on the first day of school. In the outline in Part II below, I have included the suggestions offered by the Wongs (1991) for getting off to a good start with students. The most important lesson plan of the year is the one teachers prepare for that first day of school. If they do it well, and they greatly increase their chances for a successful year.

Supportive Discipline. The outline of Part II of this paper describes the theories of eight approaches to discipline, including the works of the Canters, Dreikurs and Cassell, Glasser, Gordon, Jones, Kounin, Skinner, Redl and Wattenberg, and the Wongs. While there are good ideas in each of these approaches, I find the work of Jones (1987) to be the most relevant for teachers. Let me explain.

In my efforts to help student teachers with their discipline problems, I would listen to their situations, then suggest ways for remedying the problems. In some cases it worked, but in many cases it did not. After reading Jones, I have come to realize it is not what you do, but how you do it, that makes the difference. Unlike other writers, Jones (1987) tells us precisely how to deal with a student who is misbehaving, he tells us how to do it. He calls this process "limit setting" and I refer to this as exerting personal power.

When I first read Jones' description of limit setting, I realized that this was what the effective teachers I know actually do. I had known that a certain seriousness characterized their actions, but I had not translated that seriousness into more definable terms. Jones does. He calls it "body language."

The body language of teaching is different from the body language of discipline. When in a discipline mode, Jones recommends that you move very deliberately and more slowly than normal; keep a relaxed, non-smiling, non-angry face; look the student in the eyes; face your entire body towards the potentially disruptive student; have your arms at your side, in your pockets, or behind your back, and not on your hips or folded across your chests; avoid speaking unless absolutely necessary, and then in a unemotional, calm tone; and wait until the student complies. If the student refuses to comply, you must eventually apply a consequence. Since this is not natural for most persons, Jones has teachers practice these techniques until they look and feel natural performing them. For persons who can do it well, the calm, firm, and patient use of body language is a powerful yet caring way to get your way in the classroom. A more detailed account of limit setting is contained in outline in Part II of this paper.

I have found that some teachers are not comfortable in facing a student down with limit setting. Others are not very adept at establishing warm and friendly relationships with students. Still others dislike the use of coercive power. However, if one is to be a successful teacher, one must find a style of teaching with which one is comfortable and which gives the ability to get students to do what one wants them to do. An awareness of the forms of power can help the teacher to reach this goal.

Corrective Discipline. Corrective discipline refers to the actions a teacher takes when preventive and supportive discipline fail, when in spite of our best efforts, students continue to misbehave. Jones refers to this as the backup system. It is coercive power, the application of punishment. The most extreme form of punishment in schools is corporal punishment (such as spankings), and Dobson (1970; 1992) is one of the few authors who advocate it. While this is appealing to many teachers, corporal punishment is not allowed in most schools and is generally frowned upon as a measure to be applied in schools (Orenlicher, 1992; Kessler, 1985; Kohn, 1991; Tauber, 1990).

Since corporal punishment is not an option for most teachers, it is sometimes difficult to find a consequence which will deter misbehavior. When an effective deterrent is found, parents often object to it. For example, one high school initiated a lockout in which teachers locked their doors when the tardy bell rang. Security guards then corralled the tardy students and made them remove graffiti from walls and sidewalks with scrub brushes. The policy was very effective, and tardiness was all but eliminated from the school. But when several parents complained about the policy, the scrubbing stopped, and tardiness became a serious problem once again. It is for such reasons that preventive and supportive discipline must be the main lines of defense for most teachers.

To help eliminate the adversarial relationship created by corrective discipline, Dreikurs and Grey (1968) suggest that teachers make a distinction between "punishment" and "consequences." Punishment is often viewed by students as being arbitrary and delivered by a vindictive teacher who wishes to inflict pain into a student's life. Consequences, on the other hand, follow logically from the behavior of the students. If students act in appropriate ways, there will be positive consequences; if students act in inappropriate ways, there will be negative consequences. By making students aware of both positive and negative consequences before misbehavior occurs, the teacher can avoid the perception of being vindictive. By misbehaving, a student chooses the consequence. A fuller description of consequences appear in Part II below.

School wide Discipline

There were two episodes in my professional experience which shocked my sensibilities and convinced me that it is not sufficient to deal with discipline solely at the classroom level, that discipline is in fact a school wide problem. The first episode involved a student teacher who was visibly pregnant. She taught in a high school, and during the lunch hour she and her cooperating teacher would allow students into the classroom to eat their lunches. One day a boy approached the pregnant student teacher and told her, in the crudest of street talk, that he would like to make love to her. She ran from the room to find her cooperating teacher. The teacher, in following the school's policy of trying to settle things at the classroom level before referring an offender to the office, talked to the boy. She then assured the pregnant teacher that it would not happen again. Several days later the boy returned to her classroom, grabbed her by the arms, and tried to pull her body into his, all the while muttering his passion for her (in words unsuitable for print). She ran in terror to the principal's office to report the incident. After school, the principal talked with the student teacher, stating "Don't worry. He'll never do that again. I told him if he ever touches you again, I'll kick him out of school." In both instances the student should have been referred to the police; for assault and sexual harassment in the first case, for battery in the second. Yet the school administrator chose to merely warn the boy. The message was clear: A student can sexually harass and assault a teacher without serious consequences.

The second episode affected me personally. During a seminar a student teacher came up to me to explain that her sixth-grade students were doing something awful, and since I was going to visit her the following day, she wanted me to know that the students did the same thing to their regular teacher. It seems that Robert, a difficult lad, would repeat everything she said. The entire class would then repeat it in unison. Sometimes, she said, this would continue all day long.

I reassured the student teacher that I understood, and the following day I arrived at the school during the lunch hour to find eight teams of students playing basketball on the outdoor court. The class that I was to visit was playing, and Robert and four of his friends were sitting in the shade of a building watching the game. I wandered over and watched the remainder of the game with them. When the game was over, the teams gave a cheer for one another.

"Two-four-six-eight, who do we appreciate? Mrs. Nakamura's team! Mrs. Nakamura's team! Mrs. Nakamura's team!" And so on.

Suddenly Robert and his four friends shouted, "Two-four-six-eight, who do we appreciate? Mr. Bald Head! Mr. Bald Head! Mr. Bald Head!"

Oh, did I forget to mention that I am bald headed? Well I am, and being the true professional that I am, I ignored their rudeness, smiled at them, and walked back towards the classroom.

"Two-four-six-eight, who do we appreciate? Mr. Bald Head! Mr. Bald Head! Mr. Bald Head!" they yelled at an even louder pitch.

This time I couldn't ignore it, and being the true professional that I am, I said, "Geez thanks boys, that's the first time I've ever received a cheer for being bald headed!"

And Robert said, "Geez thanks boys, that's the first time I've ever received a cheer for being bald headed!"

And his four friends shouted, "Geez thanks boys, that's the first time I've ever received a cheer for being bald headed!"

Now there were about a hundred kids and ten teachers walking nearby, watching the gathering storm. Being the true professional that I am, I said, "Come on, boys, that's not very nice!"

And Robert said, "Come on, boys, that's not very nice!"

And the four boys shouted, "Come on, boys, that's not very nice!"

And being the true professional that I am, I walked away quickly, ignoring the boys. Suddenly, one of the boys ran up and slapped me on the back of my bald head, very hard. Whap! And being the true professional that I am, I turned and shouted, "You little b_*st_*rds!"

And Robert gleefully shouted, "You little b_*st_*rds!"

And the four boys, juking theirs heads back and forth, arms extended, as if enticing me to chase them, laughingly shouted, "You little b_*st_*rds!" Things went downhill from there.

This episode was a turning point for me. For the first time, I understood at the emotional level what it was like to be teacher when students are being rude and disrespectful. I recalled the student teacher who had let his students slap him on the back of the head, and suddenly I was less critical of him. I was less critical, too, of other teachers who, from time to time, had performed an unprofessional act towards students. If I could lose my temper, then anyone could!

In retrospect, it is rather funny episode. But at the time, I was so humiliated by the incident that I did not mention it to anyone for more than a year. Then, one afternoon while addressing a group of teachers, I spoke of my experience with Robert and his friends, I spoke of my embarrassment and humiliation. After the meeting, several teachers waited around to speak to me in private. One by one they confessed to me stories they had never shared with anyone else, stories, similar to mine, of their humiliation by students in classrooms, stories of reprisals by students, stories of years of silent suffering.

One teacher caught two boys smoking marijuana outside her classroom and turned them into the principal. The following day students started throwing rocks at her from behind bushes. When she reported this to the principal, she was told that it would be impossible to catch the kids since they hid behind bushes. Long after those students had graduated, other students still carried on the tradition of throwing rocks at her.

Another teacher's small children came home from school from time to time with gum in their hair, placed there by older students who told the children their mother was a witch. Since it occurred on the bus, the school administration could do nothing about it.

Yet another teacher was tormented by a group of sixth-grade boys who would get behind her and run their hands up her legs to her panties. She scolded the boys, but they continued to do it. Finally, she told her story to the principal. He reasoned that since she was an attractive young woman, and since she wore dresses and skirts, she was partly to blame for the problem. He advised her to wear jeans or slacks.

Over the past several years many other teachers have told me of the daily abuse they silently suffer at the hands of children. Gradually, piece by piece, a rather disturbing picture began to emerge. Rather than just a few isolated incidents, there appeared to be a general pattern of teacher suffering at the hands of children. But more disturbing was the fact that teachers suffered in silence, not knowing what to do about the humiliation they suffered each day. Just as many battered wives blames themselves for the abuse their husbands' unleash upon them, so, too, do many battered teachers blame themselves for the troubles they have in class. They are ashamed of their situation, and they suffer in silence. My message to such teachers is clear: I tell them they are not alone, that many other teachers suffer similar insult. I also tell them it is not their fault, that there is no excuse for rude and disrespectful behavior, regardless of the teacher's shortcomings.

Teachers need to support and help one another far more than is currently the case. I believe an assault on one teacher is an assault on all teachers. As a community of professional teachers, everyone needs to be more aware of the conditions in the schools and be willing to help each other in times of need. Strong teachers should not criticize teachers who are having discipline problems. Instead, they should be willing to help them. Teachers having problems with students should seek help. It might be embarrassing at first, but in the long run such individuals will become stronger teachers.

Many educators believe that teachers will not have serious discipline problems if they have good lesson plans, or are democratic teachers, or genuinely love their students, or whatever. The implication, though perhaps not intended, is that if students misbehave, it is the teacher's fault. I wish it were true that good teaching would end all discipline problems. But it won't. To be sure, the suggestions offered in this paper will help teachers become more effective, and teachers should continuously strive for improvement. But the problem of discipline in our schools today far transcend the individual teacher's ability to cope with them. Problems such as that encountered by the pregnant student teacher, as well as many of the other situations I have described in this paper, are caused by school policies which do not hold students accountable for their actions. Until we do hold students strictly accountable, we will continue to have serious problems.

For this reason, I now believe it is absolutely essential for all schools to develop a school wide discipline plan which everyone will support and enforce. This is not as easy as it may sound, for it is often difficult to get an entire faculty to agree upon and enforce the rules and procedures in the school. Nonetheless, if we are to create schools which are places of respect and learning, we must make the effort. The last section of the outline in Part II of this paper contains some ideas on school wide discipline.

Concluding Remarks

I began this paper by stating that all teachers had the common goal of wanting to see their students learn and grow as a result of their teaching. Today, more than ever before, that goal includes the development of character as well as academic and cognitive skills. If our culture is to survive, we must first produce decent people. I hope I have not sounded pessimistic in my remarks, for I am optimistic about the future. This is a great time to be a teacher, for both the community and the teaching profession are beginning to acknowledge the seriousness of the problems which face our schools. I view these problems as opportunities, and opportunities abound.

Your Discipline Plan?

As the culminating assignment for the course I teach on classroom discipline, I require each student to develop a written discipline plan. The outline of discipline which follows in Part II presents many practical ideas for the classroom teacher. Readers might search for ideas which they think might be useful to them. If they do not have a written discipline plan, and if they need one, why not try to develop one? Using the categories of preventive, supportive, and corrective discipline, they might put down those things which they think might work for them. They might determine which kinds of power they can most reasonably develop, and list ideas which might enhance this power.

Definitions

I. Classroom Discipline is the business of enforcing classroom standards and building patterns of cooperation in order to minimize disruptions and maximize learning.

A. Preventive Discipline consists of those things a teacher can do to prevent discipline problems from occurring.

B. Supportive Discipline consists of those things a teacher can do while teaching to support the student's ability to behave appropriately.

C. Corrective Discipline consists of the consequences we apply for student misbehavior.

II. Power is the ability to get students to do what you want them to do.

A. Attractive Power is derived from the teacher's relationships with students. Students do what the teacher wants because they like the teacher.

B. Expert Power is derived from the teacher's superior knowledge. Students do what the teacher wants because of the teacher's enthusiasm for and knowledge of the subject.

C. Reward Power is derived from the teacher's ability to dispense rewards, especially approval and praise. Students do what the teacher wants because they want to receive a reward from the teacher.

D. Coercive Power is derived from the teacher's ability to punish. Students do what the teacher wants to avoid punishment.

E. Legitimate Power is derived from the students' belief that the teacher has the right to decide what to do in the classroom. Students do what the teacher wants because they think they should follow the directions of the teacher.

F. Personal Power is derived from the teacher's ability to use effective body language while setting limits. Students do what the teacher wants because they see the teacher as being personally powerful.

I. Preparing and Organizing Your Classroom.

II. Preparing and Organizing Your Instruction. (Expert Power)

III. The First Day of School (Wong, H., & Wong, R., 1991).

IV. The First Weeks of School.

V. Some Suggestions for Building Relationships with Students (Attractive Power).

I. The Emotional and Psychological Aspects of Discipline.

II. Relaxation and Body Language while in the Discipline Mode.

III. Limit Setting - Part I: The Look and Turn (Personal Power).

IV. Limit Setting - Part II: Moving in on the Student (Personal Power).

V. Limit Setting - Part III: Moving Out (Personal Power).

VI. Types of Back Talk.

VII. Nasty Back Talk.

VIII. Putting Back Talk in Proper Perspective.

IX. Limit Setting on the Wing: What effective teachers actually do.

X. When Limit Setting Might Fail.

I. GROUP DYNAMICS (Redl & Wattenberg, 1951).

II. USING EFFECTIVE INSTRUCTIONAL STRATEGIES (Kounin, 1970).

III. BEHAVIOR MODIFICATION (Adapted from B.F. Skinner, 1971, 1984).

IV. SOCIAL DISCIPLINE (Dreikurs & Cassel, 1972).

V. MEETING STUDENT NEEDS WITHOUT COERCION (Glasser, 1969, 1985, 1990).

VI. TEACHER EFFECTIVENESS TRAINING (Gordon, 1974).

VII. ASSERTIVE DISCIPLINE (Canter, L., & Canter, M., 1976, 1992).

I. A SERIES OF ESCALATING RESPONSES.

II. "My Action Plan" (Wong, H., & Wong, R. (1991).

III. The Letter to Mom and Dad (Jones, 1987).

IV. Obtain Administrative Support.

V. Obtain Support of the Parents.

VI. Use Rewards to Motivate Desired Behavior (Reward Power).

VII. Responsibility Training (RT) (Jones, 1987).

VIII. Omission Training, An adjustment to Responsibility Training (Jones, 1987).

I. The Backup System or Punishment (Jones, 1987).

II. Small backup responses are private.

III. Medium backup responses are within the classroom, but public.

IV. Large Backup responses involves someone outside the classroom.

V. Extra large backup responses involve the law.

I. The Key Players.

II. The Rules Should Cover all Aspects of the School.

III. School Wide Discipline Begins in the Classroom.

Canter, L. (1976). Assertive discipline. Seal Beach, CA: Canter and Associates.

Charles, C. (1981, 1985). Building classroom discipline. White Plains, NY: Longman.

Chernow, F.B., & Chernow, C. (1981). Classroom discipline and control: 101 practical techniques. West Nyack, NY: Parker Publishing.

Dobson, J. (1970). Dare to discipline. Wheaton, IL: Tyndale House.

Dobson, J. (1972). The new dare to discipline. Wheaton, IL: Tyndale House.

Dreikurs, R. & Cassel, P. (1972). Discipline without tears. New York: Hawthorn.

Dreikurs, R. & Grey, L. (1968). A new approach to discipline: Logical consequences. New York: Hawthorn.

Emmer, E.T., Everton, C.M. (1981). Synthesis of research on classroom management. Educational Leadership, 38(4), 342-347.

Fairholm, G. & Fairholm, B.C. (1984). Sixteen power tactics principals can use to improve management effectiveness. National Association of Secondary School Principals Bulletin, 68 (472), 68-75.

French, J., Jr., & Raven, B. (1960). The bases of social power. In D. Cartwright & A. Zander (Eds.), Group dynamics: Research and theory. New York: Harper & Row.

Froyen, L.A. (1988). Classroom management: Empowering teacher-leaders. Columbus, OH: Merrill Publishing Company.

Glasser, W. (1969). Schools without failure. New York: Harper and Row.

Glasser, W. (1985). Control theory in the classroom. New York: Perennial Library.

Glasser, W. (1990). The quality school: Managing students without coercion. New York: Harper and Row.

Gordon, T. (1974). T.E.T.: Teacher effectiveness training. New York: Peter H. Wyden.

Jones, F.H. (1987). Positive Classroom Discipline. New York: McGraw-Hill.

Kessler, G. (1985). Spanking in school: Deterrent or barbarism? Childhood Education, 61(3): 175-176.

Kohn, A. (1991). Caring kids: The role of the schools. Phi Delta Kappan, 72(7): 496-506.

Kounin, J. (1971; 1977). Discipline and group management in classrooms. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston.

Orenlicher, D. (1992). Corporal punishment in the schools. IAMA, 267(23): 3205.

Redl, F. & Wattenburg, W. (1951). Mental hygiene in teaching. New York: Harcourt, Brace and World.

Shrigley, R. (1985). Curbing student disruption in the classroom: Teachers need intervention skills. National Association of Secondary School Principals Bulletin, 69(479), 26-32.

Skinner, B.F. (1971). Beyond freedom and dignity. New York: Appleton.

Skinner, B.F. (1984). The shame of American education. American Psychologist, 39(9): 947-954.

Sprick, R.S. (1985). Discipline in the secondary classroom. West Nyack, NY: The Center for Applied Research in Education, Inc., Section IV.

Tauber, R. (1995). Classroom Management. New York: Harcourt Brace College Publishers.

Wong, H. & Wong, Rosemary (1991). The first days of school. Sunnyvale, CA: Harry K. Wong Publications.

The significance of early literacy development and the importance of the home for this purpose has been widely recognized by educators. However, the nature of the model by which early literacy best occurs has not been critically addressed. Both home and school are necessary and crucial partners in fostering children's early literacy development. Models cannot be unidirectional in focus but must recognize parents and teachers, homes and schools as co-partners.

Early literacy, family literacy, and intergenerational literacy tend to dominate current writing, research, and projects on literacy development. Within the past 25 years or so, the focus on early literacy has shifted from the school to the home (Spreadbury, 1996). This shift was partly based on the realization that early literacy development extends beyond school - that teachers cannot accomplish the task alone (Neuman, 1996), and that parents, regardless of home conditions, are generally interested in their children's educational welfare (Snow et al, 1991). However, many models conceptualizing this shift have become lopsided in that schools have generally being given the role of telling parents what to do to help their children. This approach is most commonly used with lower socioeconomic and poor working class parents whose homes are often viewed by schools from a deficit perspective.

The purpose of this paper is to argue that while early literacy, family literacy, or intergenerational literacy are key to literacy development, a unidirectional model from home to school is not the most appropriate model. If children, especially children from non-middle/upper class families are to have the necessary opportunities and experiences for literacy, then there must be a co-partnership model between school and home.

Valuing Home Literacy

One reason why a school-home unidirectional model of literacy development does not work is because it fails to recognize that parents/caregivers are the children's first, continuous, and most important teachers, a point emphasized by Voss (1996). It does not respect parents' knowledge or what they already have accomplished with their children. It ignores the fact that even with few literacy materials in the home and/or with low levels of formal education, parents have the best interests of their children at heart, and often automatically and subconsciously do things which support and foster their children's learning. Taylor and Dorsey-Gaines (1988) found this to be the case even among inner-city families growing up in great poverty.

Purcell-Gates (1997) argues that there is a significant influence on school literacy from the reading and writing experiences of the home. In the home children learn important literacy concepts such as intentionality, written language register, and the alphabetic principle. These concepts are generally learned at home for as Meier and Britsch (1997) point out, literacy is a dynamic and developmental process involving language, thought, and social interaction which children experience from a very early age. In fact, Roskos (1997) notes that the integration of play and literacy by children is no accident. Play and literacy are normal aspects of development - play provides a social context for literacy.

A project, PRINTS (Parents' Roles Interacting with Teacher Support) was initiated by the author and two colleagues in two community centres in St. John's (Fagan, Cronin, Anderson, 1997). This project was based on an asset oriented model. The goals of the project were:

1. To empower parents as early literacy providers.

2. To help parents become more aware of the roles they play and can play in their children's early literacy development.

3. To support parents in initiating positive changes in the home environment to foster literacy development.

4. To help teachers become more aware of the roles they play and can play in children's early literacy development.

5. To support teachers in initiating positive changes in the school environment to foster early literacy development.

6. To help parents and teachers become more aware of each others' roles in early literacy development and to foster co-partnerships. This also entailed acquainting parents with "technical" or "school" terminology whenever the occasion arose.

7. To provide a cost-effective model for fostering home-school partnerships and early literacy development.

Parents were provided opportunity to demonstrate the range of literacy activities in which they engaged their children. They were already very much involved in their children's learning; there was much for which they could be given positive feedback. Parents were aware of their children's knowledge, such as being able to recognize letters, and count. One parent brought sheets of scribbling/drawings of her child to the Program to show what the child could do. Parents sang and recited nursery rhymes to their children, and when the words of the song, Hush Little Baby, was given out in a session, one parent said now she could sing all the words because it was her child's favourite. They played a variety of games with their children. One of the parents, who also had a child in grade four, had enrolled the child in a special reading class offered at the university. They read to their children; they were aware of which books were appropriate for young children. One parent told of how she used a trip to the supermarket to help her child recognize letters by directing the child to the letter which began an item, such as "b" for "beans". The parents demonstrated great patience with their children. When they returned from the centre at the end of a project session, it was not uncommon for the child to be waiting and have the parents read and re-read a book five or six times (books were given to the parents for the children). Most parents knew the stories of the books by heart. Some parents took their children to the public library (a bus ride) to borrow books, and to performances by child entertainers. A parent of one kindergarten child, who wanted to attend the Homework Haven sessions at the centre but who had no homework from school, went to a local general store, and purchased a book with exercises which the child could take to the centre for that purpose. They were very aware of their children's needs and abilities and monitored their children's progress. Two of the parents noted that initially their children (age 2 and 3) were not interested in books and print, but then during the project became very involved and demanded that books be read to them and that the parents make various letters of the alphabet for them. Similar results of literacy in the home were documented in studies as far away as Texas (Williams and Lundsteen, 1997) and Oxford, England (Grimes and Davies, 1997).

Meier and Britsch (1997) suggest that educators have been using the wrong metaphor for home-school relationships - bridging the gap. This metaphor suggests a divide, a chasm, a separation. Instead they promote strengthening connections. Positive literacy experiences already exist in the home as well as at school. The task is to recognize and acknowledge both and to make connections so that one reinforces the other and children become the key beneficiaries.

Strengthening School-Home Connections

While home and school entail many literacy experiences, these sometimes differ in their nature and in the contextual setting in which they occur. Purcell-Gates (1997) reminds us that literacy experiences of the home come from the lives of the children - their living rooms, the playground, the streets, their family context and from community involvement. Literacy in school, on the other hand, is usually based on books. Strengthening connections may originate from various directions.

Home-Literacy Projects

In home-literacy projects, the mediator is usually a professional, a community worker, researcher or facilitator. Workshops or sessions with parents (and perhaps the children) are important in early literacy development, according to Williams and Lundsteen (1997) as they "allow parents to be active participants in their children's education" (p. 10).

The outcome of PRINTS was highly successful based on information on parental involvement, expressed satisfaction, children's literacy participation, and parents' knowledge, and adaptations, of literacy tasks according to their children's needs. A project based on a similar model in Oxford, England, did not have such positive results. The differences in results between both can best be highlighted by noting the different characteristics of both settings. A key factor in the Oxford project was the role of the professionals who initiated the project. The authors of the project evaluation (Grimes and Davies, 1997) state that the "reciprocal relationship between parents and professionals is a complex and challenging task for which there are few common guidelines" (p. 1). According to the evaluators the parents felt either intimidated by theoretical language or patronized by simplistic information, or annoyed by suggestions of keeping records, etc. While the project facilitators modeled literacy activities with the children, the parents were not always clear of the purposes of these activities. Also, parent sharing of home literacy activity was often limited and when comments were made, they were not always responded to in terms of explanation and noting relationships to other activities. The evaluators concluded that the organization of the project produced an imbalance of power perception between project staff and parents "which served to perpetuate the common perceptions of their 'expert' and non-expert' roles, respectively" (p. 10).

The PRINTS project did not encounter any of these difficulties.

1. The project was community based. The parents gathered at their community centre and not at a school. They took responsibility for setting times, for opening and closing the centre, use of facilities, deciding on the feasibility of literacy activities for their children (who ranged in age from 2 to 5 years). For a final session, teachers were invited to attend their centre. As one parent commented during the program, "These are our Thursday nights".

2. In order to play down any imbalance in facilitator-parent background, little reference was made to university (from which the facilitators came). In introductions, the facilitators talked about experiences in their lives with little reference to the university setting. (About two-thirds of the way through the project, one of the parents asked a facilitator if he were with the university.) First names were used. Adopting an asset orientation helped in that facilitators expressed interest in the parents sharing about what they were doing and did not promote a perception that they were there to tell parents what to do. There was an attempt to avoid theoretical and simplistic language, but when an occasion arose from parent discussion/sharing, a technical or school literacy term would be introduced as another label for that experience.

3. In the PRINTS project, children were not directly involved. The children were considered the "absent participants". This did not mean they were not important; any activities introduced in the project always kept the children in mind and the children were the beneficiaries of these activities from the parents and in a playtime setting at the centre.

When literacy activities were shared with parents by the facilitators, they were modeled with the parents in terms their rationale and procedures to be used with the children. When feasible, parents were involved in constructing and gathering materials and resources for the activities. Parents were given an "activity cue sheet" to help them remember the activity. These sheets tended to include drawings or non-print cues.

4. The parents were never asked to keep records. This was an issue of discussion, especially with respect to transfer of knowledge. But parents seemed to have very occupied days and "demands" on them may have made the workshop a less pleasant experience.

5. The basic structure of the model on which the PRINTS and Oxford projects were constructed was always visible in the PRINTS project in contrast to the latter. Five contexts in which literacy develops were identified: talk, play, books and book sharing, environmental print, and scribbling/drawing/writing; there were five roles which parents and teachers could take in facilitating literacy development in these contexts: providing opportunity, recognizing/ acknowledging, interacting, modeling, setting guidelines. Wooden blocks (2"x3"x8") were used to build a "stairs to literacy" and each step was labeled as one of the contexts; the supporting blocks for the steps represented the roles. Also the contexts and roles were printed on poster cards and displayed during discussions. All literacy activities shared with the parents were discussed in terms of the five roles although the terms were not always used.

6. One of the recommendations of the Oxford project was that specific practical strategies be developed to be shared with the parents. This was an essential part of the PRINTS project. The first part of each session was devoted to having parents share what was happening in their and their children's lives with respect to literacy, while the second part consisted of the facilitators sharing activities with the parents. There were a total of 34 literacy activities across the five contexts shared with the parents.

7. Unlike the Oxford project, PRINTS facilitators capitalized on any comments made by the parents and extended them and related them to other literacy activities so that the parents could better understand the literacy value of the activities they described. For example, when one parent, said she would "go crazy" if she had to read a certain book one more time, the facilitator talked about the importance of re-reading, and memory of stories, as a way of helping children develop competence in book language (written register). On another occasion a parent brought a drawing of her 3 year old which consisted of different size circles but which represented (according to the child) different members of the family and a story line. The parent excused the drawing as being "not very good", at which point the facilitator talked about the important knowledge the child had developed: the meaning of lines/drawings as a code, an awareness that this code could be used to name people and tell a story, and that it was only a matter of simple transfer between the child's lines/drawings and the use of print for similar purposes.

The one place where PRINTS and the Oxford projects were similar was that initially parents did not contribute much in the way of sharing home literacy experiences. Later in the session, one parent volunteered, "You know, we didn't really know what you were looking for. We thought you expected something special. We never knew you were interested in day-to-day things."

Kindergarten-School Contexts

There is no doubt that kindergarten and school contexts differ from home contexts; the question is the extent of these differences and the implications for literacy development. Purcell-Gates (1997) points out that while the home is bounded by the family and community context, and the use of literacy within these environments, literacy in school is bounded by school uses of print which may differ to a greater or lesser degree. The fact that there are more books in kindergarten classrooms may not make a difference, a point demonstrated in research by McGill-Franzen and Allington (1997). They studied a number of kindergarten classrooms in the Philadelphia area under three conditions: providing a significant number of books, providing the books and training sessions (30 hours) for the teachers, and a control condition with neither. It was only the classroom with the books AND training that resulted in a marked improvement in the literacy of the children.

A surprise finding in a study by Meier and Britsch (1997) in preschool settings was the lack of reading to children. Since school eventually moves into more "print contextualized" versus "environment contextualized" demands, the importance of story reading is crucial as Meier and Britsch point out. They maintain that story reading "introduces children to a situation in which language alone is used to create experiences. Since language becomes more and more central to learning as children progress through school, story reading in preschool provides essential preparation for a style of teaching that is frequently part of later school experiences" (p. 14).

But it is not simply a matter of reading stories to children according to Lo (1997). Children benefit most from story reading when the interaction between story reader and child is one of co-construction rather than of a question-answer nature. Neuman and Roskos (1997) maintain that children best develop literacy expertise through social practice. There must be engagement of the children in real life (or simulated) literacy tasks and that such experiences should be available in kindergarten. Meier and Britsch (1997) note that teachers identified lack of consistency in home literacy experiences for many of the children as a problem. If the focus is on making connections, rather than bridging the gap, then kindergarten should form a transitional experience from home to school. Kindergarten should promote socially based literacy activities. The role of kindergarten should not be intervention or remediation, but one of continuation, collaboration, congruency, and challenge. Teachers must foster the interweaving of social and academic factors. While independence for the children may be a goal of kindergarten, this may not be a meaningful goal for children of some families where there has been little parental supervision. The children may already have attained great independence. The teacher's task then is not to help the children attain independence but to develop with them a sense of ownership and responsibility. However, to provide this kind of transition, the kindergarten teacher must understand the home environment.

Williams and Lundsteen (1997) suggest that kindergarten teachers be knowledgeable of the earliest literacy development so that they can understand the continuity from home to school. The PRINTS project is based on the premise that children, especially from non-middle/upper class families, will more likely attain success in school if parents and teachers become co-partners. For that reason, PRINTS was also implemented with kindergarten teachers in a school which the majority of the children from one of the communities attended. The teachers were exposed to the very same model as were the parents, except that the school context became the focus for the literacy activities. Information on literacy activities in the home was shared with teachers, and from school settings with parents by the project facilitator.

Parents and Educators

The perceived role disparity between parents and early literacy professionals may also apply to parents and educators/teachers. Since there is a common basis (children), the role disparity seems to result from knowledge base, language used, perceptions, and attitude. Expectations by teachers for parents to have taught their children certain things before entering school seems to be a recent rather than an historical occurrence. In the PRINTS project, the teachers placed more emphasis on activities that were more print related. They believed that parents could be expected to (a) teach their children their address and phone number, (b) introduce the alphabet and beginning sounds, (c) help them develop fine motor skills through such activities as stringing beads, and cutting, (d) ask questions about things, (e) take time to answer all the children's questions, (f) engage in discussion, and (g) help them read. In fact, school expectations were so dominant that they were known to the parents and influenced what the parents did. Consequently, the parents were more inclined to involve their children in tasks that contained letters or words. They often had difficulty seeing how "play-like" literacy activities would assist in their children's literacy development while they readily saw the connections of print based activities. However, one parent pointed out that "not all parents will have their child up to the expectations of the school so the teacher must do whatever she can to help these children." The parent added - in a low voice suggesting a possible unfamiliarity with a new term that had been introduced during the project, but with pride that she was able to understand and use it - "that is scaffolding, isn't it?"

If parents and teachers are to be co-partners, then the parents must have some access to the technical terminology used to describe literacy development. Such terminology cannot be taught didactically such as a vocabulary class in school. Rather the terms must describe activities or situations shared by the parents and introduced at that time. Some of the terms introduced in this way during PRINTS were:
 

• emergent literacy


• environmental print


• invented spelling


• setting (as in a story)


• metaphorical language/figurative language


• scaffolding


• phonics


• sounding words by analogy

"Scaffolding", for example, was introduced when parents were talking about what was important in their children's lives at that time. One parent noted that her child (age 4) was now imitating her in dusting and in drying dishes. She always wanted the dish towel. The mother made her a small dish towel of her own, and gave her one dish to dry. This occasion was used to illustrate how parents are keenly aware of their children's interests and abilities, and of parents' interest in involving them in different tasks. The experience was used to point out how parents make tasks manageable for children, how they meet the children halfway so that they will be involved and will be successful. The term "scaffolding" was then introduced as a label for how the parent acted. It was pointed out that "scaffolding" was a term commonly used by teachers/educators today, and different examples of scaffolding in a school environment were given. The terms "figurative language" and "metaphorical language" were introduced when an activity about recognizing sights and sounds around the house was discussed as a way for children to attend to detail. When the parents were asked to talk about sounds around the house, one parent mentioned the kettle boiling, and said that her daughter (age 3) described this as the "kettle crying". This example was used to talk about figurative and metaphorical language, and its role in poetry and in school in general.

As a result parents gained considerable confidence in themselves and in their knowledge. At the start of the project, they were cautious about who would be involved. Towards the end when a Department of Education primary coordinator expressed interest in visiting the project, the parents were excited and anxious for the person to arrive. They were likewise enthused that the teachers were to meet at the center for the wrap-up session.

Williams and Lundsteen (1997) provide an interesting suggestion for making connections between parents and kindergarten teachers. They advise that parents and teachers be shown how, and encouraged, to keep portfolios of their children's literacy work. A parent in their study commented that portfolios contained "evidence" of what the parent knew about her child's literacy development. By sharing examples from portfolios, parents and teachers can better appreciate the similarity and differences in home and school contexts.

A study by Graue (1991) showed how the parents of two communities (one an upper middle-class suburb, and the second a rural working class community) differed in their behaviour during parent-teacher interviews. The parents from the middle-class background usually brought their own agenda, initiated questions, and shared information about their children. The parents from the rural working class community perceived their role as attending and listening. The teacher as authority was to inform, tell, explain, and advise. If parents keep portfolios for their children, then these can constitute starting points for parents (regardless of SES) to share, explain, and advise about their children during parent-teacher interviews.



Socio-cultural Factors

Making connections between home and school is not a simple matter. Teachers may not come from the same backgrounds as many of the parents and may not even understand their communities and their lives. Teachers have developed a particular philosophy on literacy development which may or may not correspond to current thinking and research in the area. A big mistake that is often made in providing for connections between school and home for parents of non-middle/upper class status is that parents within this group are homogeneous. Nothing could be further from the truth. Throughout the PRINTS project, the authors learned that there is a hierarchy of parents based on interest, determination, and involvement in the literacy/education of their children. Given the opportunities, these parents will likely match middle/upper class parents in supporting their children's literacy development. Roskos (1997) points out that literacy is a different experience in different SES settings, but as the authors of PRINTS discovered, literacy is a different experience in different families, regardless of SES. A challenge in making connections between school and non-middle/upper class families is to reach all, especially those parents whose children have the least enriching and productive literacy experiences.

A second important sociocultural factor is the influence of transgenerational experiences and attitudes. A study by Kaplan, Liu, and Kaplan (1997) with students in junior high and with the same group as parents twenty years later, found varying impacts of transgenerational factors. They state, "Parents who have not had successful school experiences may consciously or unconsciously expect and end up reinforcing the negative school experiences of their own children. On the other hand such parents may remember their own negative school experiences, and they may want to do whatever they can to reduce the likelihood that their children will experience the same types of negative events at school as they did" (p. 10). Whether parents who have had negative school experiences transfer this effect to their children depends on a number of factors, such as the experiences which the children themselves have, the degree of contact between parent and child, the emotional bond between them, the perceptions of the child of parent support, the birth order of the child, and the current relationship between school and the parents. Parent influence may also be based on their experiences in academic programs (GED, ABE) in which they are currently enrolled. The nature of the instruction they receive may become a powerful mediator influencing their expectations of the nature of school learning for their children. For example, one setting in which parents are expected to do much of the work on their own, read information to answer questions or complete "tests", and to redo these tests until they get the expected mark, is going to generate a vastly different model of expectations for learning than a setting in which parents and instructor co-construct problems and solutions, in which the parents as learners are challenged to think, read, and write critically, and engage in literacy related action, when appropriate.

Another factor that has implications for building school-home connections is the gender of the parent who becomes involved. In the case of PRINTS, all parents/grandparents were female. This was also the case in the Meier and Britsch study in California. The reasons for fathers and grandfathers not getting involved, and the significance of this non-involvement needs to be investigated.



Summary

Making connections between school and home is vital if all children are to advantageously engage in literacy development. A quote from Meier and Britsch (1997) provides an excellent summation of this goal. They state there is a "need for a continual and evolving emphasis on central aspects of literacy teaching and learning in early childhood settings, and in particular, the role of literacy as community in the process of better understanding central factors influencing the quality of the collective literacy experiences between teachers, students and families" (p. 3).

  REFERENCES  

Fagan, W.T., Cronin, M.C., & Anderson, J.G. (March, 1997). Parents and teachers as co-partners, learners and helpers in early literacy development in two low-income communities. Paper presented at the American Education Research Association Annual Meeting, Chicago.



Graue, M.E. (April, 1991). Construction of community and the meaning of being a parent. Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Education Research Association, Chicago.



Grimes, J., & Davies, C. (March, 1997). Understanding partnerships with parents: Does the ORIM framework help? Paper presented at the American Education Research Association Annual Meeting, Chicago.



Kaplan, D.S., Liu, X., & Kaplan, H.B. (March, 1997). Transgenerational continuities of negative school experiences: Contextual stability and intervening processes. Paper presented at the American Education Research Association Annual Meeting, Chicago.



Lo, D.E. (March, 1997). Individual differences in the social construction of knowledge with young children over a storybook reading. Paper presented at the American Education Research Association Annual Meeting, Chicago.



McGill-Franzen, A., & Allington, R. (March, 1997). Print-rich kindergarten classrooms dramatically enhance learning. Paper presented at the American Education Research Association Annual Meeting, Chicago.



Meier, D.R., & Britsch, S.J. (March, 1997). Building a literacy community: The role of literacy and social practice in early childhood program reform. Paper presented at the American Education Research Association Annual Meeting, Chicago.



Neuman, S.B., & Roskos, K. (March, 1997). Early literacy learning from a social practice perspective. Paper presented at the American Education Research Association Annual Meeting, Chicago.



Neuman, S.B. (April, 1996). Are opportunities enough? Examining the effects of a social-construction approach to family literacy on children's concepts of print and responses to literature. Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Education Research Association, New York.



Purcell-Gates, V. (March, 1997). A sociocultural lens for understanding early literacy learning. Paper presented at the American Education Research Association Annual Meeting, Chicago.



Roskos, K. (March, 1997). An ecocultural view of early literacy learning. Paper presented at the American Education Research Association Annual Meeting, Chicago.



Snow, C., Barnes, W.S., Chandler, J., Goodman, I.F., & Hemphill, L. (1991). Unfilled expectations: Home and school influence on literacy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.



Spreadbury, J. (April, 1996). Cross-text, parent-child interactive book reading behaviours of different books across three different genres. Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Education Research Association, New York.



Taylor, D., & Dorsey-Gaines, C. (1988). Growing up literate: Learning from inner-city families. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.



Voss, M. (1996). Hidden literacies: Children learning at home and at school. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.



Williams. P., & Lundsteen, S.W. (March, 1997). Home literacy portfolios: Cooperative tools for assessing parents' involvement in their prekindergarten child's literacy development. Paper presented at the American Education Research Association Annual Meeting, Chicago.

  STRUCTURAL CHANGE COMBINED WITH TRAINING CAN DELIVER EFFECTIVE SITE-BASED MANAGEMENT   Lorraine Devereaux Holy Redeemer Elementary School Trepassey   Abstract

This article centers around a research project involving fifteen schools based both in Canada and in Europe. It brings awareness of the basic power shifts considered essential for effective site-based management. It conveys knowledge that training in site-based management theory when combined with exposure to site-based management in practice does make a difference to the success of this contemporary management system. This difference was especially evidenced in the area of leadership approach, which requires particular and immediate training focus prior to implementation of site-based management.



There appears to be a growing realization of the need for change in the educational system among researchers (Barth, 1990; Fullan, 1993; Sergiovanni, 1994). Numerous calls from society for increased school effectiveness and advanced student achievement implies that a cooperating management team within schools is a fundamental ingredient for school improvement. Site-based management, in which principal, teachers, parents, community members and students are given autonomy to effect educational change, is accentuated as a credible change mechanism that has the capacity to revitalize today's educational system (Herman & Herman, 1992; Hill, Bonan & Warner, 1992; Midgley & Wood, 1993). Site-based management requiring school-based decision making and increased stakeholder involvement presently engulfs schools in many regions of the western world. For example, Australia, New Zealand, more than forty states in the United States, as well as all European countries (with the exception of Portugal and some areas of Germany), have already placed their faith in this contemporary management system. In addition, Canadian provinces such as Nova Scotia and Newfoundland and Labrador have recently joined Alberta, Saskatchewan and Prince Edward Island in their quest for shared decision making in school management (Nova Scotia Department of Education, 1994). In their advocacy for school-based decision making, The Royal Commission of Inquiry into the Delivery of Programs and Services in Primary, Elementary, and Secondary Education (Royal Commission, 1992, p. 222) suggest that schools flourish when groups that collectively pursue a common goal are given the power to initiate change and face together the complex forces that are influential in teaching and learning. Currently in its formative years of site-based management, Newfoundland and Labrador's recent reduction in the number of school boards adds fuel to the necessity for increased school-based decision making in this province.



Deterrents to Site-Based Management

This mostly mandated structural change, however, presents educators and researchers with a major concern. As educational practitioners confront implementation of this blanket government policy, there is fear that not all site-based management participants may be sufficiently informed about consensus decision making to ensure effective change in such a vital area for school improvement (Collins, 1995; Devereaux, 1995; Sheppard & Devereaux, 1997). It is a widely held belief that without sufficient training for school council participants, a move to site-based management may be superficial, simply changing the power base from one group setting to another (Conley & Bacharach, 1990; Fullan, 1993; Nova Scotia Department of Education, 1994; Sergiovanni, 1994). The Steering Committee for School Council Implementation (1994, p. 7-8) suggested that "resistance to sharing power is perhaps the greatest barrier to change," while Collins (1995) reiterated concerns expressed by The Royal Commission (1992) that it is quite possible that school councils may be dominated by principals.

Contemplating this anxiety, The Royal Commission (1992, p. 211) suggested that, "competent leadership is critical for any major restructuring to work, but it will need to be developed and nourished and steps will have to be taken to identify appropriate leadership models, skills and potential leaders." In Newfoundland and Labrador, The Schools Act 1996 clearly places responsibility for establishment of legislated school councils among the duties of each and every school principal in this province. Since the essential role of the school principal as change agent is widely recognized (Mahon, 1991; Hannay, 1992; Haughley and Rowley, 1991; Keedy and Finch, 1994), training and professional development are vitally needed for adoption of site-based management (Bailey, 1991; Bolman and Deal, 1991: Peeler, 1991; Thurston, Clift and Schact, 1993).

Many researchers recognize that the transformational leadership approach is steadily emerging as the preferred form of leadership for change (Bass, Waldman, Avolio and Bebb, 1987; Brown, 1994; Leithwood, 1992). Kouzes and Posner (1995) report similar sentiments as they recount findings based on a sample of more than 36,000 managers and their subordinates that stress challenging the process, inspiring a shared vision, enabling others to act, modeling the way, and encouraging the heart as effective leadership practices in a site-based management environment.



Purpose and Methodology of Study

This study was initiated specifically to identify the appropriate leadership approach required for the successful implementation of school councils. It was undertaken to ascertain approaches to leadership and power that were perceived to exist in schools and to determine if leadership and power positions varied with involvement in school councils.

To accomplish this objective, a two-phase research study was conducted. In phase one, a group of research participants in Newfoundland and Labrador, Canada, were selected and were invited to respond to two survey type questionnaires: the Leadership Practices Inventory (Kouzes and Posner, 1989) and The Relationship Between Principals and Members of School Councils (Chapman, 1982). The composition of the sample population for this quantitative non-experimental investigation included 207 principals, teachers, parents, community members and students from thirteen schools. From this sample, seven schools were involved in school councils, while involvement with site-based management in the remaining six schools was nil.

The second phase of the investigation was conducted in two site-based managed European schools. Claims that this environment has one of the most highly evolved types of site-based management, as well as accessibility to schools having several decades of involvement in self-management, attracted the researcher to this specific setting. Through this qualitative component of the study, data were gathered using taped interviews, journal keeping, principal shadowing, and analysis of school policy and other school-related documents. Opportunities for participant observation in various work situations, including both staff and school council meetings, were provided to the investigator spanning a period of one month. Approximately two weeks of data collection was conducted per school. During this time two interview schedules that were grounded in the questionnaires already used in Canada were administered.

Due to the composition of participants in the qualitative section of the study, extra caution was applied to ensure confidentiality in data presentation. There was one male and one female principal; therefore one principal was labeled as male gender and referred to as Principal One; the other principal was designated female gender and referred to as Principal Two (the gender may or may not be accurate). All teacher and school council member participants in this study were referred to as female (again, the gender may or may not be accurate).



Findings

The image of fifteen schools sprawled throughout sparsely populated rural areas and densely populated urban areas in parts of Canada and Europe conjures up diversity. Equally diverse is their exposure in varying degrees to site-based management. In Canada noninvolvement and involvement in the initial stages appeared to be the norm. In Europe, however, excitement mounts as the researcher discovered the possibility to study site-based management that spans decades and, further still, to investigate completely autonomous site-based management. In the totally site-based managed school, contact with school boards had been eliminated, thereby giving the school council complete control over how the funds they received directly from government were dispersed. An unveiling of these site-based management structures in the Spring of 1995 allowed rich insights into the site-based management world of principal, teachers and parents.

Findings from the European aspect of this study indicate that even though structural change has occurred and involvement in site-based management is afforded them, some school principals continue to practice a "top down" traditionalist approach to leadership, maintaining "power over" other school council members and thus capitalizing on their positional power. Genuine stakeholder involvement in shared decision making which accompanies effective site-based management appears non-existent. The primary site-based management goal of improved student learning becomes secondary to the struggle for power. The expertise of school council members remains dormant and their varying perspectives on school-related issues are not reflected upon; consequently there is maintenance of the status quo. This is evidenced in the following comments gathered from interviewed principals and their school council representatives. One school principal expressed the belief that leadership "should be enabling." However, in reference to a school council member's contribution the principal contended:

I find it irksome for the school council to be run through elementary ways of doing things. ...The school council members have recognized that I am prepared to take on the management role in the fullest extent. ...I recognize that it can be seen as a block, a stitch up, I recognize that, but it hasn't been challenged. My school council members seem to be happy with the way we operate. (Devereaux, 1995)



A council member at this same school suggested that the principal had almost the full balance of power on school council and that as a school council member, she believed she should be given a little more leeway, stating:

I feel restricted. ...Even if we have something to say we get knocked down... We all have our little pigeon holes. ...We just do what the principal tells us all the time. (Devereaux, 1995)



In reference to whether the principal of another school used her expertise to influence school council members, a school council representative declared:

The principal just has her say. She doesn't try to lay down any laws. (Devereaux, 1995)



The principal of this school expressed her leadership beliefs, contending, "it's got to be democratic." Conversely, when addressing the issue of the principal's influence on school council, she declared:

I think most school councils, and I'm speaking for my own, they do listen to the principal. I mean 99.9% of the time the principal has her way. (Devereaux, 1995)



Neither of these principals practiced the transformational leadership approach that is compatible with site-based management. Both principals either directly or indirectly used their influence on school council. The principal who opted for total self-management for his school used expertise and positional power to completely dominate school council members. The principal at the school board controlled site used manipulation, subtly maneuvering school council members into following her agenda. Thus, these principals left school council members powerless to effect change in the educational systems of these particular schools. Although no generalizations can be made from these two schools, these findings suggest that involvement in site-based management does not guarantee that principals' leadership approaches are in alignment with the site-based management philosophy. Legislated structural change does not ensure acceptance of the shared decision making necessary for effective school councils.

At the time when this study was undertaken, site-based management was a new educational concept in Newfoundland and Labrador. Because it was a pilot project, financial resources were provided to train involved principals and school council members in site-based management theory and practice. Quantitative data collected from this phase of the research study suggest that others perceived that a more transformational approach to leadership was exhibited by principals involved in piloting the school council project, while those who were not involved were perceived to be less open to change and therefore not inclined to readily adapt to site-based management. An R-square of 0.124 was obtained when multiple regression analysis was applied to determine if there was a relationship between school council members' perceptions of the principals' leadership approach and the schools' involvement in the school council pilot project. Thus, 12% of variance in leadership approach is explained by involvement in school councils (DF=1, 190; F=26.88; P<0005). These findings may appear contradictory to those found in the European environment; however, the significant training and support pilot school council members were given must be taken into account. Also, it should be noted that these particular principals may have already been interested in working in a shared leadership setting, since school council involvement had not been legislated at that time and principals' involvement in school councils was totally voluntary.



Ramifications

Principals are entrusted with school council implementation and are expected to become advocates for shared decision making. Consequently, movement toward management at the local school setting heightens the level of principal involvement making the principal's role in a site-based managed school even more critically related to a school's success. This changing role also requires a change in leadership approach and use of power. The new leadership approach required for successful site-based management is not innate and can be learned (Kouzes & Posner, 1995); therefore professional development for principals and other school council members is imperative for the success of site-based management (Wood & Caldwell, 1991; Levin, 1992; Tucker-Ladd, Merchant & Thurston, 1992).

One Principal of a site-based managed school forewarns us of dangers associated with site-based management when there is lack of adequate funding for resource materials and professional development resources at the school level, stating,

If the government doesn't realize it can't expect primary education to lift itself to the standards required without more resources, we're all done for. ...We are at busting point and the big risk is that we've got all these plates spinning and we won't be able to keep them all going and, you know, the possible disaster is they'll all crash to the floor. ...Now, that's a cry from the hearts of principals and it's a cry from the heart of teachers, everybody, maybe school council members too, but I think those, in a sense, are not yet close enough to see what's happening. (Devereaux, 1995)



Through site-based management training, stakeholders are prepared for striving in unison toward the common goal of elevating student performance to the highest possible level in each particular school. Working together they develop school policies, formulate the essential skills and knowledge required by today's students, review and pursue personnel and curriculum resources needed for effective school operation, and draft an action plan on how to best offer students distinctive quality preparation in all growth areas. Then, site-based management participants share accountability and responsibility for decisions that are made. Equipped with a clear focus on the primary goal, while being supported and encouraged by the other school council members, teachers are empowered and challenged to promote higher standards of achievement and to raise student outcomes. Hence, site-based management affects teaching and learning in the classroom in a positive way and provides a pathway to the delivery of the best possible schooling for our children. Emerging theories of The Learning Organization, in which school-based management is an integral component, have already been shown to make inroads in the educational change process, contributing to improvements in teaching, learning and student outcomes (Sheppard, 1995).

Provision of the necessary resources to properly train school council members will give site-based management a fair chance for success. Through professional training, those who are closest to schooling will be equipped with the knowledge of how to implement and maintain effective site-based management. Only then can the potential of school councils, as a means to bring about the changes in student achievement that society considers vital for the workforce of today and tomorrow, be truly realized.

    REFERENCES  

Bailey, W. (1991). School-Site Management Applied. Lancaster, GB: Technomic Publishing.

Barth, R. (1990). Improving Schools from Within: Teachers, Parents and Principals Can Make a Difference. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Bass, B., Waldman, D., Avolio, B., & Bebb, M. (1987). Transformational leadership and the falling dominoes effect. Group and Organizational Studies, 12(1), 73-87.

Bolman, L. & Deal, T. (1991). Reframing Organizations: Artistry, Choice and Leadership. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Brown, I.M.J. (1994). Leadership in secondary schools. Unpublished doctoral thesis, University of Toronto.

Chapman, J. (1982). Relationship Between Principals and Members of School Councils: An Attitude Scale. Clayton, Victoria, Australia: Monash University.

Collins, A. (1995). Enhancing Local Involvement in Education Through Quality Leadership. St. John's, NF: Faculty of Education, Memorial University of Newfoundland.

Conley, S., & Bacharach, S. (1990). From school-site management to participatory school-site management. Phi Delta Kappan, 71(7), 539-544.

Devereaux, L. (1995). The leadership approach that facilitates adoption of school councils. Unpublished master's thesis, St. John's, NF: Memorial University of Newfoundland.

Fullan, M. (1993). Change Forces: Probing the Depth of Educational Reform. New York: Falmer Press.

Hannay, L. (1992). The Principal Plus Program for Change. The Canadian School Executive, 11(7), 3-9.

Haughley, M., & Rowley, R. (1991). Principals as change agents. The Canadian Administrator, 30(8), 1-9.

Herman, J., & Herman, J. (1992). Educational administration: School-based management. The Clearing House, 65(5), 261-263.

Hill, P., Bonan, J., & Warner, K. (1992). Uplifting education. The American School Board Journal, 179(3), 21-25.

Keedy, L., & Finch, A. (1994). Examining teacher-principal empowerment: An analysis of power. The Journal of Research and Development in Education, 27(3), 162-173.

Kouzes, J., & Posner, B. (1989). Leadership Practices Inventory. Palo Alto. CA: TPG/Learning Systems.

Kouzes, J., & Posner, B. (1995). The Leadership Challenge. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass Publishers.

Leithwood, K. (1992). The move toward transformational leadership. Educational Leadership, 42, 8-10.

Levin, B. (1992). School-based management. The Canadian School Executive, 11(9), 30-32.

Mahon, P. (1991). What to do when rhetoric of reform turns into reality. The Executive Educator, 13(1), 25-28.

Midgley, C., & Wood, S. (1993). Beyond site-based management: Empowering teachers to reform schools. Phi Delta Kappan, 73(3), 245-252.

Nova Scotia Department of Education (1994). Preparing All Students for a Lifetime of Learning. Halifax, NS: Nova Scotia Department of Education.

Peeler, T. (1991). Principals: Learning to Share. Thrust for Educational Leadership, April, 24-27.

Royal Commission of Inquiry into the Delivery of Programs and Services in Primary, Elementary, and Secondary Education (1992). Our Children, Our Future. St. John's, NF: Newfoundland and Labrador Department of Education.

Sergiovanni, T. (1994). Organizations or communities? Changing the metaphor changes the theory. Educational Administration Quarterly, 30(2), 214-226.

Sheppard, B. (1995). Implementing change: A success story. Morning Watch, 23(1-2), 1-25.

Sheppard, B., & Devereaux, L. (1997). Leadership training is essential to effective site-based management. The Canadian School Executive, 16(8), 3-8.

Steering Committee on School Council Implementation (1994). Working Together for Educational Excellence. St. John's, NF: Newfoundland Department of Education.

Thurston, P., Clift, R., & Scacht, M. (1993). Preparing leaders for change-oriented schools. Phi Delta Kappan, 75(3), 259-265.

Tucker-Ladd, P., Merchant, B., & Thurston, P. (1992). School leadership: Encouraging leaders for change. Educational Administration Quarterly, 28(3), 397-409.

Wood, F. & Caldwell, S. (1991). Planning and training to implement site-based management. Journal of Staff Development, 12(3), 25-29.



Lorraine Devereaux is a teacher and is Acting Vice-Principal at Holy Redeemer Elementary School, Trepassey, NF, A0A 4B0. She is also a School Council Consultant in the Province of Newfoundland and Labrador, Canada. Contact: Lorraine Devereaux at the above address. Telephone: (709) 438-2377, Fax: (709) 438-2245, E-mail: ldeverea@calvin.stemnet.nf.ca

  TECHNOLOGICAL DETERMINISM AND THE ENGLISH CLASSROOM   Barrie R.C. Barrell Faculty of Education

As curriculum planners are swayed more and more by the influences of technological determinism, it becomes imperative that all educators try to get a broader sense of the changing socio-cultural interactions that take place within classrooms. Digitized information manipulation, on-line communications, the incorporation of electronic files and graphics into texts, the transferring and downloading of World Wide Web data, and the inclusion of HyperCard and other interactive multimedia programs into documents are all becoming part of the regular high school English curriculum as we move toward the next millennium (see the 1996 Atlantic Canada English Language Guide). In addition, for high school English students, the experimenting with Home Page technologies (using HTML language) "to become information providers on the Internet...," the creating of a "broadcast/Home Page for their schools," and the planning of publicity campaigns in a range of media, are all part of t he changing English language arts curriculum (p. 155). This essay will discuss some of the challenges these types of curriculum objectives have for the English classroom and give some insights into their pedagogical implications.

English, as a discipline, has been taught in schools for about 130 years (Applebee, 1974). Its general structure has remained the same within the university; a literary canon is studied and appropriate composition skills are used to demonstrate an understanding of various literary works. This decoding/analytic literacy is typically marked by generic concepts delivered to learners through anthologies or textbooks. In turn, students individually study the material and demonstrate the power of their textual engagements through analytical papers, tutorials, and/or examinations.

Canadian and U.S. high schools typically used this form of English instruction until the 1980s. Scholars such as Rosenblatt (1978), Iser (1980), Crossman (1982) and Sholes (1985) challenged this methodology and moved English teaching toward a transactional/critical form of literacy. In the process, individual learning succumbed to collaborative learning, preconstructed learning outcomes gave way to student constructed meaning, and the quests for the ultimate literary criticism gave ground to confirming and deconstructing personal and aesthetic readings of texts. The 1980s saw an increase in the use of nonprint texts such as music, film, television, and photojournalism in the English classroom. What is important here is that high school Engl ish instruction began to take on a very different appearance from university English instruction. An individual student's engagement with literary works became a paramount concern; historical or critic's conception of a particular work took on lesser importa nce.

English language arts curriculum in the 1990s has greatly expanded the kinds of texts given over to study (See for example the 1996 Foundation for the Atlantic Canada English Language Art Curriculum document and the Western Canadian Protocol- Common Curriculum Framework). CD Rom technologies, multimedia texts, Internet links, and rock videos are now among the many items to be 'read' for meaning. As the very physical nature of texts has changed so too has the student's modes and methods of recording and responding to textual engagements. Representing has been added to the traditional strands of reading, writing, listening, and speaking. Students are encouraged to demonstrate their responses to various textual engagements through 3-D constructions and presentations, multimedia assemblages, models, or graphic displays. The result is that high school English as a subject, with its expanded notion of what can be 'read' and its move and acceptance of multiple ways of representing knowled ge, is now markedly different from university or traditional conceptions of the discipline.

Information, media, and visual literacies are increasingly taking their place along side more traditional understandings of literacy. To be clear, information literacy is computer based and uses multiple technologies to produce and manipulate data. Media literacy is understood to be an engagement with the mass media in ways that will give insight into how it manufactures and manipulates meaning. Visual literacy is an ability to conceptualize and understand the symbolism in static and moving images, and to understand their impact as they construct meaning.

The result of this all-inclusive conception of English education is a discipline with new and greatly expanded parameters. A vocational/technical conception of education is being juxtaposed against an aesthetic/literary one; efferent readings are challenging aesthetic readings for class time. In this reconstruction, media and computer accessed information is assured a greater and greater role in the curriculum. In some quarters the discipline of English is undergoing a name change. General stud ents will be taking "Communications" instead of English in grades 11 and 12 in Atlantic Canada (Atlantic Canada English Language Arts Curriculum Guide. Draft: July 8, 1996, pp. 31, 32, and 35). English will be for the elite--those who are university bound (p. 31). Communications courses are vying with English courses for a central place within the English high school curriculum.

What is disturbing about the direction of the new English language arts curriculum is that it is adding enormous amounts of material to an already overcrowded program of studies. The addition of a course on media studies or the inclusion of a business course on computer-based text manipulation or a computer course in advanced graphic design sounds progressive. However, the incorporation of these topics within the English language arts program, as they are in Atlantic Canada, causes pressure to be placed on limited instructional time. This is not to say that the use of new technologies is not applicable in responding to texts; rather in the literature class it is the response that is of importance as opposed to the packaging. Behind the most technologically advanced special effects Hollywood movie is a written script.

Teachers of English are now expected to engage students in a multitude of texts in a variety of mediums. With the expansion of the definition of text comes an expanded definition of what constitutes reading. To understand and to 'read' the media and advertisements, English teachers need to be versed in the nuances of popular culture. They are expected to build bases of cultural capital that are situated in and engaged within television, Hollywood movies, pop radio, videos and an assortment of pulp journals and novels. In order to lead students in meaningful text discussions, teachers of English are expected to keep current with media happenings. Thus Calvin Klein's pictures of scarcely clad children or Bennington's ads (texts) of copulating horse s or Disney's placement of its corporate symbols on Canadian postage stamps need to be studied. Traditional teachers of English will argue that you cannot have it all. They will say that a blending and rolling of academic, vocational, workplace, technical, personal-growth, and liberal conceptions of English into a 'one-philosophy-fits-all' notion of secondary education will not fly. The rise of electronic communications skills and the decline of literature is challenging traditional conceptions and values associated with the teaching of English. An industrial/technical/vocational model of education raises many new theoretical questions for English educators. As the new curriculum documents are implemented in Canadian high schools, questions arise about the kinds of educational backgrounds and experiences the next generation of English teachers will be expected to have since a literary education seems to satisfy only part of the new requirements of the discipline.

English teachers will need a background in specific computer skills. In Foundation for the Atlantic Canada English Language Arts Curriculum, teachers are required to be more flexible in the uses of technology in classroom practice. Included under the document's teaching suggestions are such ideas as having students "use a range of media (including, but not limited to computers) to produce a text..., edit spreadsheets, use formulas, sort information and manipulate data in a number of ways to create meaning", and "apply the principles of good design to produce a variety of desktop published documents using desktop publishing software" (p. 152). Teachers are to encourage students to "subscribe to listservs and news groups of interest to them a nd participate in electronic discussions," (p. 153).

Assuming the present generation of traditionally educated teachers can set aside the overwhelming weight of tradition and historical precedence that has come to guide and inform the intellectual habits and nuances of English instruction, a host of questions come to mind in light of these new curriculum initiatives. Literature based teachers are bound to ask a number of questions: What are the methods we might develop to evaluate electronic texts? What are the new grammars and genres students wil l need to learn as they begin to write in networked classrooms and electronic and digitized environments? How will twenty-first century virtual environments support the more traditional educational objectives of English and language arts instruction? As a culture raised on print, are we relying too heavily on print conventions to address virtual communication requirements? Some teachers of English might feel they are becoming the servants of technology and question a curriculum that focuses on Internet communicating rather than looking at the structure of human communications. Others will question the use of multimedia and a cacophony of technologies to make critical judgments about media and technology. They will direct students to more traditional sources and see in them the tried and tested seeds for developing critical thought.

As I have written elsewhere (Barrell, 1996), the exposure to Internet information and databases fails to guarantee much. Just as the existence of community libraries did not guarantee literacy, neither does the availability of computer printouts, Internet search engines, complex statistical graphing, or technological forecasting necessarily improve instruction or learning. In the English classroom it is time, memories, solitude, and companionship that are the ingredients that encourage one's idea s to marinate and mature into thoughtful words and creative actions. Literature study, as Northrop Frye would have us understand it, is there to educate the imagination. We need to be careful about moving away from time spent on aesthetic textual engagements and creative critical thought. Efferent reading is useful, but it must not come to dominate student readings. Just as I have asked questions about what it means to write in electronic environments, I can also see that a new set of reading sk ills is required to function well in hypertext. The act of 'reading' on the Internet is not as simple as we might think. Print authors restrict our reading as well as control and filter the flow of information that reaches us. Reading on the Internet, if it is to be done knowledgeably and skilfully, requires an ability to elbow past undifferentiated information and to find links that render access to relevant data. Because of the multiplicity of pathways on the Internet, I see the instructional role of the teacher as being responsible for finding pathways through encroaching distracters and advertisements to worthwhile sites. They must make sure that the lateral reading access the Internet gives students is not done at the expense of depth. Teachers of English in the next millennium will need to develop trustworthy, accurate, reliable, and reapplicable materials and be able to leave markers for students to follow as they venture and read in various sites (Barrell, 1997).

English educators will need to spend time assessing the new conception of high school English instruction being introduced in Canada. Though they have argued over the nature and the thrust of various literary canons, they have tended to agree that aesthetic readings are key to understanding the human condition and for allowing young people to engage with the issues that impact on their lives. They know it allows students to vicariously experience human motives, conflicts, and values. Technology i s seriously challenging literature for time and space in the English classroom. A balance must be struck so that English does not simple become a vehicle for working and operating in cyberspace.

  REFERENCES  

Atlantic Provinces Education Foundation [On-line WWW] Available: http:/www.ednet.ns.ca/educ/d-depot/APEF/.

Applebee, N. (1974). Tradition and Reform in the Teaching of English: A History. Urbana, IL: NCTE.

Atlantic Canada English Language Arts Curriculum Guide. Government of Newfoundland and Labrador Department of Education. (Draft: July 8, 1996).

Barrell, Barrie (1997). "Hyper reading of Hypertext." Prospects: The Journal of the Canada/Newfoundland Cooperation Agreement on Human Resource Development. (In press.)

(1996). "From Sputnik to Internet: A Critical Look at Instructional Innovations." The Journal of Professional Studies, Vol. 4, No. 1, 66-72.

Crossman, R. (1982). "How Readers Make Meaning. College Literature, 9(2), 7-15.

Foundation for the Atlantic Canada English Language Arts Curriculum, (1996).

Iser, W. (1980). "The Reading Process: A Phenomenological Approach," in J.P. Thomkins (Ed.), Reader Response Criticism: From Formalism to Post-Structuralism, (pp. 50-69). Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.

Martin, Jane Roland (1995). "There's Too Much to Teach: Cultural Wealth in an Age of Scarcity." Educational Researcher, Vol. 25, No. 2, pp. 4-10, 16.

Rosenblatt, L. (1978). The Reader, The Text, The Poem: The Transactional Theory of Literary Works. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University.

Sholes, R. (1985). Textual Power: Literary Theory and the Teaching of English. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

Selfe, Cynthia L., Dawn Rodrigues, and William R. Oates, eds. (1889). Computers in English and Language Arts. Urbana: National Council of Teachers of English.

Selfe, Dickie (1995). "Surfing the Tsunami: Electronic Environments in the Writing Center." Computers and Composition, 12, 311-322.

Western Canadian Protocol-Common Curriculum Framework [On-line WWW]. Available: http://ednet.edc.gov.ab.ca/wp/wphome.html.

The York Region Board of Education English, Curriculum Division, Program Guideline, Intermediate and Senior Divisions, Grades 7-12, 1991.

  TECHNOLOGICAL DETERMINISM AND THE ENGLISH CLASSROOM   Barrie R.C. Barrell Faculty of Education

As curriculum planners are swayed more and more by the influences of technological determinism, it becomes imperative that all educators try to get a broader sense of the changing socio-cultural interactions that take place within classrooms. Digitized information manipulation, on-line communications, the incorporation of electronic files and graphics into texts, the transferring and downloading of World Wide Web data, and the inclusion of HyperCard and other interactive multimedia programs into documents are all becoming part of the regular high school English curriculum as we move toward the next millennium (see the 1996 Atlantic Canada English Language Guide). In addition, for high school English students, the experimenting with Home Page technologies (using HTML language) "to become information providers on the Internet...," the creating of a "broadcast/Home Page for their schools," and the planning of publicity campaigns in a range of media, are all part of t he changing English language arts curriculum (p. 155). This essay will discuss some of the challenges these types of curriculum objectives have for the English classroom and give some insights into their pedagogical implications.

English, as a discipline, has been taught in schools for about 130 years (Applebee, 1974). Its general structure has remained the same within the university; a literary canon is studied and appropriate composition skills are used to demonstrate an understanding of various literary works. This decoding/analytic literacy is typically marked by generic concepts delivered to learners through anthologies or textbooks. In turn, students individually study the material and demonstrate the power of their textual engagements through analytical papers, tutorials, and/or examinations.

Canadian and U.S. high schools typically used this form of English instruction until the 1980s. Scholars such as Rosenblatt (1978), Iser (1980), Crossman (1982) and Sholes (1985) challenged this methodology and moved English teaching toward a transactional/critical form of literacy. In the process, individual learning succumbed to collaborative learning, preconstructed learning outcomes gave way to student constructed meaning, and the quests for the ultimate literary criticism gave ground to confirming and deconstructing personal and aesthetic readings of texts. The 1980s saw an increase in the use of nonprint texts such as music, film, television, and photojournalism in the English classroom. What is important here is that high school Engl ish instruction began to take on a very different appearance from university English instruction. An individual student's engagement with literary works became a paramount concern; historical or critic's conception of a particular work took on lesser importa nce.

English language arts curriculum in the 1990s has greatly expanded the kinds of texts given over to study (See for example the 1996 Foundation for the Atlantic Canada English Language Art Curriculum document and the Western Canadian Protocol- Common Curriculum Framework). CD Rom technologies, multimedia texts, Internet links, and rock videos are now among the many items to be 'read' for meaning. As the very physical nature of texts has changed so too has the student's modes and methods of recording and responding to textual engagements. Representing has been added to the traditional strands of reading, writing, listening, and speaking. Students are encouraged to demonstrate their responses to various textual engagements through 3-D constructions and presentations, multimedia assemblages, models, or graphic displays. The result is that high school English as a subject, with its expanded notion of what can be 'read' and its move and acceptance of multiple ways of representing knowled ge, is now markedly different from university or traditional conceptions of the discipline.

Information, media, and visual literacies are increasingly taking their place along side more traditional understandings of literacy. To be clear, information literacy is computer based and uses multiple technologies to produce and manipulate data. Media literacy is understood to be an engagement with the mass media in ways that will give insight into how it manufactures and manipulates meaning. Visual literacy is an ability to conceptualize and understand the symbolism in static and moving images, and to understand their impact as they construct meaning.

The result of this all-inclusive conception of English education is a discipline with new and greatly expanded parameters. A vocational/technical conception of education is being juxtaposed against an aesthetic/literary one; efferent readings are challenging aesthetic readings for class time. In this reconstruction, media and computer accessed information is assured a greater and greater role in the curriculum. In some quarters the discipline of English is undergoing a name change. General stud ents will be taking "Communications" instead of English in grades 11 and 12 in Atlantic Canada (Atlantic Canada English Language Arts Curriculum Guide. Draft: July 8, 1996, pp. 31, 32, and 35). English will be for the elite--those who are university bound (p. 31). Communications courses are vying with English courses for a central place within the English high school curriculum.

What is disturbing about the direction of the new English language arts curriculum is that it is adding enormous amounts of material to an already overcrowded program of studies. The addition of a course on media studies or the inclusion of a business course on computer-based text manipulation or a computer course in advanced graphic design sounds progressive. However, the incorporation of these topics within the English language arts program, as they are in Atlantic Canada, causes pressure to be placed on limited instructional time. This is not to say that the use of new technologies is not applicable in responding to texts; rather in the literature class it is the response that is of importance as opposed to the packaging. Behind the most technologically advanced special effects Hollywood movie is a written script.

Teachers of English are now expected to engage students in a multitude of texts in a variety of mediums. With the expansion of the definition of text comes an expanded definition of what constitutes reading. To understand and to 'read' the media and advertisements, English teachers need to be versed in the nuances of popular culture. They are expected to build bases of cultural capital that are situated in and engaged within television, Hollywood movies, pop radio, videos and an assortment of pulp journals and novels. In order to lead students in meaningful text discussions, teachers of English are expected to keep current with media happenings. Thus Calvin Klein's pictures of scarcely clad children or Bennington's ads (texts) of copulating horse s or Disney's placement of its corporate symbols on Canadian postage stamps need to be studied. Traditional teachers of English will argue that you cannot have it all. They will say that a blending and rolling of academic, vocational, workplace, technical, personal-growth, and liberal conceptions of English into a 'one-philosophy-fits-all' notion of secondary education will not fly. The rise of electronic communications skills and the decline of literature is challenging traditional conceptions and values associated with the teaching of English. An industrial/technical/vocational model of education raises many new theoretical questions for English educators. As the new curriculum documents are implemented in Canadian high schools, questions arise about the kinds of educational backgrounds and experiences the next generation of English teachers will be expected to have since a literary education seems to satisfy only part of the new requirements of the discipline.

English teachers will need a background in specific computer skills. In Foundation for the Atlantic Canada English Language Arts Curriculum, teachers are required to be more flexible in the uses of technology in classroom practice. Included under the document's teaching suggestions are such ideas as having students "use a range of media (including, but not limited to computers) to produce a text..., edit spreadsheets, use formulas, sort information and manipulate data in a number of ways to create meaning", and "apply the principles of good design to produce a variety of desktop published documents using desktop publishing software" (p. 152). Teachers are to encourage students to "subscribe to listservs and news groups of interest to them a nd participate in electronic discussions," (p. 153).

Assuming the present generation of traditionally educated teachers can set aside the overwhelming weight of tradition and historical precedence that has come to guide and inform the intellectual habits and nuances of English instruction, a host of questions come to mind in light of these new curriculum initiatives. Literature based teachers are bound to ask a number of questions: What are the methods we might develop to evaluate electronic texts? What are the new grammars and genres students wil l need to learn as they begin to write in networked classrooms and electronic and digitized environments? How will twenty-first century virtual environments support the more traditional educational objectives of English and language arts instruction? As a culture raised on print, are we relying too heavily on print conventions to address virtual communication requirements? Some teachers of English might feel they are becoming the servants of technology and question a curriculum that focuses on Internet communicating rather than looking at the structure of human communications. Others will question the use of multimedia and a cacophony of technologies to make critical judgments about media and technology. They will direct students to more traditional sources and see in them the tried and tested seeds for developing critical thought.

As I have written elsewhere (Barrell, 1996), the exposure to Internet information and databases fails to guarantee much. Just as the existence of community libraries did not guarantee literacy, neither does the availability of computer printouts, Internet search engines, complex statistical graphing, or technological forecasting necessarily improve instruction or learning. In the English classroom it is time, memories, solitude, and companionship that are the ingredients that encourage one's idea s to marinate and mature into thoughtful words and creative actions. Literature study, as Northrop Frye would have us understand it, is there to educate the imagination. We need to be careful about moving away from time spent on aesthetic textual engagements and creative critical thought. Efferent reading is useful, but it must not come to dominate student readings. Just as I have asked questions about what it means to write in electronic environments, I can also see that a new set of reading sk ills is required to function well in hypertext. The act of 'reading' on the Internet is not as simple as we might think. Print authors restrict our reading as well as control and filter the flow of information that reaches us. Reading on the Internet, if it is to be done knowledgeably and skilfully, requires an ability to elbow past undifferentiated information and to find links that render access to relevant data. Because of the multiplicity of pathways on the Internet, I see the instructional role of the teacher as being responsible for finding pathways through encroaching distracters and advertisements to worthwhile sites. They must make sure that the lateral reading access the Internet gives students is not done at the expense of depth. Teachers of English in the next millennium will need to develop trustworthy, accurate, reliable, and reapplicable materials and be able to leave markers for students to follow as they venture and read in various sites (Barrell, 1997).

English educators will need to spend time assessing the new conception of high school English instruction being introduced in Canada. Though they have argued over the nature and the thrust of various literary canons, they have tended to agree that aesthetic readings are key to understanding the human condition and for allowing young people to engage with the issues that impact on their lives. They know it allows students to vicariously experience human motives, conflicts, and values. Technology i s seriously challenging literature for time and space in the English classroom. A balance must be struck so that English does not simple become a vehicle for working and operating in cyberspace.

  REFERENCES  

Atlantic Provinces Education Foundation [On-line WWW] Available: http:/www.ednet.ns.ca/educ/d-depot/APEF/.

Applebee, N. (1974). Tradition and Reform in the Teaching of English: A History. Urbana, IL: NCTE.

Atlantic Canada English Language Arts Curriculum Guide. Government of Newfoundland and Labrador Department of Education. (Draft: July 8, 1996).

Barrell, Barrie (1997). "Hyper reading of Hypertext." Prospects: The Journal of the Canada/Newfoundland Cooperation Agreement on Human Resource Development. (In press.)

(1996). "From Sputnik to Internet: A Critical Look at Instructional Innovations." The Journal of Professional Studies, Vol. 4, No. 1, 66-72.

Crossman, R. (1982). "How Readers Make Meaning. College Literature, 9(2), 7-15.

Foundation for the Atlantic Canada English Language Arts Curriculum, (1996).

Iser, W. (1980). "The Reading Process: A Phenomenological Approach," in J.P. Thomkins (Ed.), Reader Response Criticism: From Formalism to Post-Structuralism, (pp. 50-69). Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.

Martin, Jane Roland (1995). "There's Too Much to Teach: Cultural Wealth in an Age of Scarcity." Educational Researcher, Vol. 25, No. 2, pp. 4-10, 16.

Rosenblatt, L. (1978). The Reader, The Text, The Poem: The Transactional Theory of Literary Works. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University.

Sholes, R. (1985). Textual Power: Literary Theory and the Teaching of English. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

Selfe, Cynthia L., Dawn Rodrigues, and William R. Oates, eds. (1889). Computers in English and Language Arts. Urbana: National Council of Teachers of English.

Selfe, Dickie (1995). "Surfing the Tsunami: Electronic Environments in the Writing Center." Computers and Composition, 12, 311-322.

Western Canadian Protocol-Common Curriculum Framework [On-line WWW]. Available: http://ednet.edc.gov.ab.ca/wp/wphome.html.

The York Region Board of Education English, Curriculum Division, Program Guideline, Intermediate and Senior Divisions, Grades 7-12, 1991.

  PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT: WHAT DO WE KNOW AND WHERE ARE WE GOING?   Jean Brown & Bruce Sheppard Faculty of Education Memorial University of Newfoundland April 1997  

The Need for Staff Development?

It was Socrates who said, "I believe that we cannot live better than in seeking to become still better than we are". That sentiment has been echoed over the years by many theorists, philosophers and educators alike. It is the ideal guiding the numerous calls nationally and internationally for the reform of schools and school systems. For state administrators, doing better might be translated as being more efficient, with making better use of public dollars. However, for teachers, doing better means improved student achievement, better instruction, and enhanced learning environments for all students. For teachers and administrators, the challenge of becoming better emphasizes their own needs to learn and to grow professionally, or in other words, the need for staff development (as it is most commonly called in the United States), or professional development (as it is often referred to in Canada).

The need for professional development has been well documented. Research conducted in 58 schools in Newfoundland, with 1059 teachers in all districts, revealed that promotion of professional development was the most significant single leadership activity that was related to increased levels of teacher commitment (the degree to which teachers are supportive of and committed to the school and their colleagues); professional involvement (the degree to which teachers are concerned about their work, are keen to learn from one another, and committed to professional development); and innovativeness (the degree to which variety, change, and new approaches are emphasized in the school) (Sheppard, 1996). These findings were confirmed in another provincial study of school improvement, in which data were gathered from 19 districts, 155 principals, 279 teachers, 223 parents, and 69 students. Responding to a mail-out survey, principals and teachers were consistent in their perception of the most important activities which motivated school improvement in their schools, indicating that the most influential were professional development activities sponsored by the district (Brown, Button, Noseworthy, & Button, 1997).

This is consistent with the recognition of the need for staff development across North America. Guskey (1994b) states that "never before in the history of education has there been a greater recognition of the importance of professional development. Every proposal to reform, restructure, or transform schools emphasizes professional development as the primary vehicle in efforts to bring needed change" (p. 42). A number of theorists, notably Fullan (1993) and Guskey (1994b, 1995) link teacher development with improvements in student learning. Guskey (1995) states that: "If we are going to have improvement in student learning than staff development is an essential prerequisite to that." Similarly, Fullan (1993) concluded: "To restructure is not to reculture", that "changing formal structures is not the same as changing norms, habits, skills and beliefs" (p.49). In other words, if teachers are to change teaching practice, or if the culture is to become a better one in the sense of improving student learning, teachers and administrators must be provided opportunities to learn. Fullan (1995), reviewing the evidence on site-based management, concluded, "restructuring reforms that devolved decision making to schools may have altered governance procedures but did not affect the teaching-learning core of schools" (p.230). He also cited Sarason who made the point even more forcefully: "Yes, we expect teachers to give their all to the growth and development of students. But a teacher cannot sustain such giving unless the conditions exist for the continued growth and development of the teacher [italics in the original]" (Sarason, cited in Fullan, 1995, p.234).

It is because of the existence of such evidence and claims, that Brandt (1994), as editor of Educational Leadership, the journal of the Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development (ASCD), issued a challenge to North American educators "to make continuous learning an integral part of every educators' professional life" (p.2). As well, this appeal is recognized in the mission statement of the National Staff Development Council (NSDC) in the United States which broadens the role of professional development in respect to continuous learning as it is not only directed at professionals, but also students and the school. It emphasizes (1) ensuring success for all students, (2) improving schools, (3) advancing individual and organizational development (Sullivan, 1997).

In Newfoundland and Labrador, the central important of professional development is highlighted by the significant proportion of the total educational budget that is used to pay teachers' salaries. In 1995-96, of the total revenues, $552.6 million, received by school boards, $418.6 million was spent in teachers' salaries (Newfoundland and Labrador, 1996). If one accepts the assumption that the essence of successful instruction and good schools comes from the thoughts and actions of the professionals in the schools, the sensible place to look in order to improve the quality of education in a school is the continuous education of educators through professional development. Glickman, Gordon, and Ross-Gordon (1995) used an analogy to automobiles. When a customer purchases a new car costing upwards of $20,000, he or she brings it in every 8,000 kilometres for routine servicing. In order to protect the investment, the customer is willing to put additional money into the car to prolong its life and performance. In this analogy, the authors identify the school board as the customer who purchases an educator. "Without resources for maintaining, fine-tuning, and reinvigorating the investment, the district will run teachers into the ground. This is far more consequential than a neglected car. The district will lose teachers, physically and/or mentally. The real losers will be the students of these teachers" (p. 334).

The above analogy becomes particularly salient when one considers the aging teacher workforce in Newfoundland and Labrador. A statistical report of Educational Indicators, Profile '96 (Newfoundland and Labrador, 1997), reveals that in the 1995-1996 school year half of the teachers and in-school administrators were over 42 years old with 18.5 or more years teaching experience. The report correctly indicates that "as the age of teachers increases, the importance of frequent and meaningful professional development opportunities will be increasingly important in order to keep teachers abreast of recent advances in theory and practice" (p.51).

  The Changing Face of Staff Development



Sparks (1996) contends that while professional development is essential if teachers and administrators are to avail of the findings of research on teaching, learning, and leadership, it must be considerably different than past practice. He observes the typical practice in the past was:



Educators (usually teachers) sitting relatively passively while an 'expert' 'exposed' them to new ideas or 'trained' them in new practices. The success of this endeavour was typically judged by a 'happiness quotient' that measured participants' satisfaction with the experience and their assessment regarding its usefulness in their work" (Sparks, 1994, p. 26).

This "expert" model has been widely criticized, in business and in education. Ryan (1995) rejects it on the grounds that it assumed there were the "experts" -- "the people who "knew" the "right" answers to our questions", and then there were the "learners" -- "generally assumed to be ignorant, passive, empty vessels who can be effectively filled up by the expert expounding knowledge" (p.279). Similarly, Joyce and Calhoun (1994) note inadequacies of past practices: "Brief, slick workshops were constructed and ratings went up, but implementation did not" (p. 4). Dillon-Peterson (1994) depicts the perspectives of other researchers (Brandt, 1994; Fullan, 1994; Guskey, 1994a; Joyce & Calhoun, 1994; Louck-Horsley, 1994; Schmuck, 1994, Wood, 1994) in the field of professional development regarding past and current practices as she reflects on 25 years of professional development. She notes the following shifts:

[1] From Emphasis on Deficit to Emphasis on Growth/Change. Originally, most 'inservice education' (as it was then labelled) was designed to fix teachers.... Most current staff development is driven by...the need to improve schools as total learning communities.

[2] From Emphasis on the Individual to Emphasis on the Group/Organization. ...Such movements as restructuring, team teaching, and organizational development...emphasize both the importance of the individual and the essential contribution she or he can make within the group if both the individual and society are to prosper.

[3] From Random Selection of Focus to More Systematic Delivery of Instruction Incorporating Principles of Adult Learning and the Use of Technology. The preferred format of staff development activities ...was the "smorgasbord". Several times a year, the ambitious staff developer would line up 50-100 "one-shot" activities an hour or two in length. Topics may or may not have been related to the curriculum or the employee's assigned responsibility. Today, there is evidence that staff development is coming of age in terms of clarification of mission, goals, and objectives. (p. 3)

Professional Development and Change

Hixton (1991) states that "Staff development must help schools move beyond simply improving what they have to developing new understandings of what they need, new visions of what is possible, and new strategies of how to 'get there from here'" (p. 4). If professional development is to serve the purpose identified by Hixton above, then professional development activities must be based on current change theory (Nowak, 1994; Shroyer, 1990). One of the most comprehensive summaries of what we know about change has been summarized by Fullan (1993)⁽¹⁾ as eight lessons of the new paradigm of change:

 
• LESSON 1: YOU CAN'T MANDATE WHAT MATTERS

"The more complex the change the less you can force it" (p.22). The only changes that can be mandated are things that do not require thinking or skill and that can be easily monitored.



• LESSON 2: CHANGE IS A JOURNEY NOT A BLUEPRINT

"Change is non-linear, loaded with uncertainty, and sometimes perverse" (p.24). A group with whom Fullan was working in the Maritimes, likened change "to a planned journey into uncharted waters in a leaky boat with a mutinous crew" (p.24). Given such uncertainty, a risk taking mentality and climate must be fostered.



• LESSON 3: PROBLEMS ARE OUR FRIENDS

"Problems are inevitable, but the good news is that you can't learn or be successful without them" (p.25). As we search for solutions we need to recognize that "conflict is essential to any successful change effort" (p.27), that "change is learning" (p.27) and that we need to value the process of finding a solution, not just the solution itself. "In short, problems are our friends; but only if you do something about them" (p.28).

• LESSON 4: VISION AND STRATEGIC PLANNING COME LATER

"Premature visions and planning can blind" (p.28). Visions should be worked on but should be open-ended and provisional. Bear, Eisenstat and Spector (as cited in Fullan, 1993) concluded from their study of 26 plants over a five year period that change efforts beginning by a corporate plan to alter the culture of the management of people are inherently flawed. Attempts to change people through the building of mission statements or training programs are based on false assumptions of how people change. Fullan does not support vision developed by leadership teams. Also, strategic planning is called into question in complex change. Louis and Miles (as cited in Fullan, 1993) contend that we should take an evolutionary perspective where strategy is viewed as a flexible tool.

• LESSON 5: INDIVIDUALISM AND COLLECTIVISM MUST HAVE EQUAL POWER

"There are no one-sided solutions to isolation and groupthink" (p.33). Collaboration is recognized as beneficial in bringing together the most intelligence possible to solve complex issues. However, we must be cautious of "group think" as we are all aware that one of life's greatest difficulties is to stand out against one's group. Solitude has a place in change. "Isolation is bad, group domination is worse. Honouring opposites simultaneously -- individualism and collegiality--is the critical message" (p. 36).



• LESSON 6: NEITHER CENTRALIZATION NOR DECENTRALIZATION WORKS

"Both top-down and bottom-up strategies are necessary .... Centralization errs on the side of over control, decentralization errs towards chaos" (p. 37). Needed is a two-way relationship of pressure, support and continuous negotiation. The "best way" will depend on the context. For example, if there is an accepted knowledge base that teachers should know it would be quite ineffective to have an "expert" do a presentation in 17 different schools. It would appear to be wiser to bring people together in one group. When we move to implementation; however, we know that it must be done at the building level.



• LESSON 7: CONNECTION WITH THE WIDER ENVIRONMENT IS CRITICAL FOR SUCCESS

"The best organizations learn externally as well as internally" (p.38). Individual moral purpose must be linked to the social good and teachers must seek opportunities to join forces with others while they focus on working with individual students. Also, the organization must contribute to and respond to the environment.



• LESSON 8: EVERY PERSON IS A CHANGE AGENT

"Change is too important to leave to the experts" (p.39). Individuals need to assume responsibility within their own environments if there is to be substantive change; they cannot leave this responsibility to others. Fullan's views are forcefully stated by Senge (1990): "All my life, I assumed that somebody, somewhere knew the answer to this problem. I thought politicians knew what had to be done, but refused to do it out of politics and greed. But now I know that nobody knows the answer. Not us, not them, not anybody" (p.281). In a learning organization, everyone must strive for personal mastery, be a team leader to develop shared vision, think systemically, challenge his or her own and others' mental models, and in so doing contribute to organizational learning.



Fullan notes that the pattern underlying the eight lessons is that each is a paradox unto itself:

simultaneously pushing for change while allowing self learning to unfold; being prepared for a journey of uncertainty; seeing problems as sources of creative resolution; having a vision, but not being blinded by it; valuing the individual and the group; incorporating centralizing and decentralizing forces; being internally cohesive, but externally oriented; and valuing personal change agentry as the route to system change. (p. 40) Professional Development Knowledge Base

After having conducted an extensive review of studies and reports on staff development programs, Glickman et al. (1995) concluded that there exists a considerable knowledge base regarding successful professional development programs. They summarize the characteristics of this knowledge base in a staff development checklist:

• Participants involved in planning and implementing
• Long-range planning
• Integration of individual and school improvement goals
• Based on principles of adult development and learning
• Released time for participants
• Incentives, support, and rewards
• Small-group learning activities
• If skill development: concrete and specific
• If skill development: demonstration, trial, and feedback during workshop
• If skill development: classroom coaching following workshop
• Experimentation and risk taking encouraged
• Regular participant meetings for problem solving and program revisions
• Instructional and school leaders participating in activities
• Ongoing, part of school culture. (p. 338)

Guskey (1994, 1995) contends that the problem with attempts to identify elements of successful professional development programs is that the success of these practices is contingent upon the context. What works in one context may not work in another. In spite of this caveat, however, he proposes a list of guidelines for success that he states are derived from research on both the change process and staff development. Guskey's six major guidelines (1994)⁽²⁾ reveals the implications of the research on both change theory and staff development, and the discussion of each reveals how the conclusions are supported by Fullan (1993) and Stoll & Fink (1996).

1. Recognize that change is both an individual and organizational process.

Research has clearly shown that the culture of the organization limits the impact that excellent people can have on the organization. Many have interpreted this finding as the need to focus on the culture of the organization at the exclusion of the individual. In fact it is this direction that has created difficulties for school improvement processes that have been employed in schools throughout the world (Stoll & Fink, 1996). If professional development and change efforts are to bring about improvements in schools then all efforts must focus on the classroom, with the realization that the school culture must value experimentation, be supportive of risk-takers, and provide opportunities for collaboration.



2. Think big, but start small.

While it is essential that all professional development occur in the context of a grand vision, it is essential that specific initiatives are small enough that they can be accomplished in a reasonable period of time, that they are realistic and clear, and that changes are measurable. Guskey (1994) states that there is one truism related to this issue of attempting changes in manageable steps: "The magnitude of change you ask people to make is inversely related to the likelihood of making it" (p. 44). It is important that teacher see that what they are doing makes a difference since teachers will only change practices when they see that they work.



3. Work in teams to maintain support.

Professional development efforts will be most successful if they occur in a context of a learning organization where norms of continuous learning and teamwork are established.



4. Include procedures for feedback on results.

If new practices are to become institutionalized then teachers must be convinced that they contribute to making a difference in student learning. Therefore, it is important that monitoring and evaluation is a critical component of professional development. Action Research is one professional development format that provides for the required feedback as it allows practitioners to become involved in systematic inquiry.



5 Provide continued follow-up, support, and pressure.

Progress toward implementation of something new is not a smooth linear process. As individuals experience the learning curve which is inherent in doing something new, they want to revert back to the tried and true practices of the past. An excellent example of this can be found through observation of people attempting to keep pace with the rapid changes in computer software. Just when they have begun to master one version of a word processing program, another more advanced program is released. Many resist moving to the newer, improved version because they know that the learning curve will be painful and, in fact while they are learning, they will be less efficient. Many who do not perceive themselves as software pioneers need some pressure to move from one program to the next. They only move to the next program either when someone else can convince them that it is indeed an improvement or if they find that their program is no longer compatible with programs used by others and is beginning to cause them difficulty. Those that have easy access to support systems and are expected by peers or by organizational expectations progress to each new advancement much more readily.



6. Integrate programs

Fullan (1993) contends that "...the main problem in public education is not resistance to change, but the presence of too many innovations mandated or adopted uncritically and superficially on an ad hoc fragmented basis" (p. 23). To avoid a perception that each new initiative introduced is yet another passing fad, it is critical that they are introduced as a component of an integrated school development plan. Improvement must be perceived as enhancement, rather than replacement. Staff Development in a Restructured Environment

There is little doubt that performance and accountability are watchwords of the nineties (Louis, 1994; Newfoundland and Labrador, 1997; Sheppard & Brown, 1996; Stoll & Fink, 1996). While governments throughout the world remain committed to performance indicators and a means of external assessment and accountability, to structural reform, and to improvements to efficiencies of their educational delivery, unfortunately, there is very little evidence to support that such changes result in substantial improvements in student learning (Cranston, 1994; Fullan, 1993; Murphy & Hallinger, 1993; Sarason, 1990; Sergiovanni, 1995).

In light of uncertainty created by reform efforts, the concept of the learning organization provides the basis of a promising theoretical framework for the development of improving schools. Louis, Kruse and Raywid (1996) contend that,

the current reform movement focuses on structural and curricular changes as the main ingredients of effective schools, but pays less attention to altering the day-to-day work of teachers. When schools are seen as learning organizations and professional communities, however, attention is focused on teachers' work as the key instrument of reform. By emphasizing needed changes in the culture of schools and the daily practice of professionals, the reform movement can concentrate on the heart of the school--the teaching and learning process. (p.7)

Fullan (1995) contends that if we are to succeed in bringing about meaningful improvement "schools must become learning organizations" (p.234). Handy (1995) argues that:

In an uncertain world, where all we know for sure is that nothing is sure, we are going to need organizations that are continually renewing themselves, reinventing themselves, reinvigorating themselves. These are the learning organizations, the ones with the learning habit. Without the habit of learning, they will not dream the dream, let alone have any hope of managing it. (p. 45)

The concept of the learning organization is grounded in the five" learning disciplines -- lifelong programs of study and practice" expounded by Senge (1990):


• Personal mastery -- learning to expand our personal capacity to create the results we most desire, and creating an organizational environment which encourages all its members to develop themselves toward the goals and purposes they choose.
• Mental models -- reflecting upon, continually clarifying, and improving our internal pictures of the world, and seeing how they shape our actions and decisions.
• Shared vision -- building a sense of commitment in a group, by developing shared images of the future we seek to create, and the principles and guiding practices by which we hope to get there.
• Team learning -- transforming conversational and collective thinking skills, so that groups of people can reliably develop intelligence and ability greater than the sum of individual members' talents.
• Systems thinking -- a way of thinking about, and a language for describing and understanding, the forces and interrelationships that shape the behaviour of systems. This discipline helps us to see how to change systems more effectively, and to act more in tune with the larger processes of the natural and economic world. (Senge, Roberts, Ross, Smith, & Kleiner, 1994, p.6)

Empirical research (Brown & Sheppard, in press; Leithwood, Dart, Jantzi, & Steinbach, 1993) has convinced us that in schools as learning organizations all educators must function both as members of teams engaged in organizational learning and also as leaders of leaders. The success of such a shift in the teachers' role (from an individualistic approach to active engagement in collaborative models of leadership which will require continued learning) is dependent upon teachers assuming a professional leadership role. In such a redefined role, teachers must have a critical professional knowledge such as knowledge of child development, and multiple teaching and assessment strategies; they must also develop norms of collaboration and continuous improvement. Stoll and Fink (1996) note that "Many teachers and others say they do not want to 'be developed'. In other words they are not looking for other people to be responsible for their learning" (p. 164). In a learning organization, "ultimately everyone, supported by colleagues, is responsible for their own learning" (p. 164). Alternative Staff Development Formats

While professional development is inherent within a learning organization, the shift in professional development formats that must occur in such an organization will represents a "paradigm shift" (Sparks, 1996). Such a shift requires that we move away from the era when professional development usually meant either a presentation by an outside consultant or a "one-shot" inservice day. Professional development will be based on "three powerful ideas that are currently altering the shape of [our] schools" (Sparks, 1994, p. 26): results-driven education, systems thinking, and constructivism. As a consequence of results-driven education, the goal of staff development must be directed at student outcomes. As educators begin to recognize the interconnectedness of all parts of the system, staff development must not be approached in a piecemeal manner. And if educators accept the constructivist assumption that knowledge is constructed in one's mind, rather than simply transmitted from one person to another, then:

Constructivist teaching will be best learned through constructivist staff development. Rather than receiving 'knowledge' from 'experts' in training sessions, teachers and administrators will collaborate with peers, researchers, and their own students to make sense of the teaching/learning process in their own contexts. (Sparks, 1994, p. 27)

Among the most important of the shifts that must occur are:

an increased focus on both organizational and individual development; staff development efforts driven by clear and coherent strategic plans; a greater focus on student needs and learning outcomes; an inquiry approach to the study of the teaching/learning process by teachers; an inclusion of both generic and content specific pedagogical skills; and greater recognition that staff development is an essential and indispensable part of the reform process. (Sparks, 1996, p.260)

In an extensive review of models of professional development, Sparks and Loucks-Horsley (1989) identified five models of professional development that revealed movement towards constructivist staff development:

• Individually-guided. Teachers plan for and pursue activities they believe will promote their own learning.
• Observation/assessment. Opportunities are provided for classroom observation by a peer or other observer. This provides teachers with objective data and feedback regarding their classroom performance.
• Involvement in A Development/improvement Process. Teachers engage in developing curriculum, designing programs, or engaging in a school improvement process to solve general or particular problems.
• Training. Teachers attend sessions to acquire knowledge or skills through appropriate individual or group instruction (May be synonymous with professional development in the minds of many educators)
• Inquiry. Teachers identify an area of instructional interest, collect data, and make changes in their instruction based on an interpretation of those data. An example is action research.




Although the potential is there to incorporate Sparks' (1995) ideas on results-driven education and systems thinking, they are implicit and not at all emphasized. More recently, Glickman et al. (1995) identify a variety of new formats for staff development which have emerged over the last several years. Some examples follow:

• Mentoring programs: An experienced teacher is assigned to a novice for the purpose of providing individualized, ongoing professional support.

• Skill-development programs: This consists of several workshops over a period of months, and classroom coaching between workshops to assist teachers to transfer new skills to their daily teaching.

• Teacher centers: Teachers can meet at a central location to engage in professional dialogue, develop skills, plan innovations, and gather or create instructional materials.

• Teacher institutes: Teachers participate in intensive learning experiences on single, complex topics over a period of consecutive days or weeks.

• Collegial support groups: Teachers within the same school engage in group inquiry, address common problems, jointly implement instructional innovations, and provide mutual support.

• Networks: Teachers from different schools share information, concerns, and accomplishments and engage in common learning through computer links, newsletters, fax machines, and occasional seminars and conferences.

• Teacher leadership: Teachers participate in leadership preparation programs and assist other teachers by assuming one or more leadership roles (workshop presenter, cooperating teacher, mentor, expert coach, instructional team leader, curriculum developer). The teacher-leader not only assists other teachers but also experiences professional growth as a result of being involved in leadership activities.

• Teacher as writer: This increasingly popular format has teachers reflect on and write about their students, teaching, and professional growth. Such writing can be in the form of private journals, essays, or reaction papers to share with colleagues, or formal articles for publication in educational journals

• Individually planned staff development: Teachers set individual goals and objectives, plan and carry out activities, and assess results.

• Partnerships: Partnerships between schools and universities or businesses, in which both partners are considered equal, have mutual rights and responsibilities, make contributions, and receive benefits. Such partnerships could involve one or more of the previously described formats. (p. 340)

In these formats too, the emphasis is on teachers having opportunities to learn, but there is no mention of linking professional development and student outcomes. Again, as with the earlier five models identified by Sparks and Loucks-Horsley (1989), there is the potential for systems thinking, particularly through networks and partnerships, but the emphasis is on the use of these formats in order to provide opportunities for teachers to learn rather than on the need to integrate the parts into the whole, or to see the big picture. The concept of the school as a learning organization allows better integration of the various components of professional development and incorporates Sparks' three powerful ideas of results-driven education, systems thinking, and constructivism, noted above. The Learning Organization Project is an example of how it was developed in one school district.



One Example of Professional Development in Schools as Learning Organizations

Two researcher at the Faculty of Education, a school district, and several schools have developed a partnership in research and development and engaged in an Organizational Learning Project. The objective is to collaborate to develop the district and the schools as learning organizations and to thereby enhance the level of student learning (Sheppard & Brown, 1996a).

As part of this project, the university researchers play the role of "critical friends" and the school staffs assume a critical-reflective role which actively involves them in the research process (Lieberman, 1995, p.3). A "critical friend" is "a trusted person who asks provocative questions, provides data to be examined through another lens, and offers critique of a person's work as a friend. A critical friend takes the time to fully understand the context of the work presented and the outcomes that the person or group is working toward. The friend is an advocate for the success of that work" (Costa & Kallick, 1993). The staff provides the closeness necessary for greater depth of understanding of practice, whereas, the university researchers are more able to distance themselves in interpreting what is happening. The district and schools get the support of two critical friends who help with data collection and analysis, collaborate in change initiatives, assist in specific professional development activities, and share current theory. The faculty researchers gain access to schools and the district for research, access to data, and access to practitioners as action researchers.

In all participating schools, a leadership institute was provided for school leadership teams at the beginning of the project (Sheppard & Brown, 1996a). Following the institute, on-going support has been provided to leadership teams in each school through both a district support network and the faculty researchers. The Learning Organization Project is consistent with the conceptual framework of the learning organization. It accepts Sparks' (1996) contention that "to become learning organizations schools must engage in organizational development activities...based on continual data collection, analysis, and feedback, focusing on the development of groups and individuals to improve group functioning" (p. 262). Schools who are participating in the project must therefore engage in action research which requires ongoing research on student outcomes, school culture, leadership, professional learning, and classroom practices. In this action research process, they gather and use new information to assess, plan, implement, and evaluate in a continuous learning cycle. Additionally, to assist in the implementation and evaluation components of the cycle, all school are provided with a problem-solving implementation tool, in the form of a district framework for implementation, based on current principles of change theory (Sheppard & Brown, 1996b) .



How is this different than past efforts?

The Learning Organization Project builds on the strengths within the district, particularly the work begun in school improvement and the expertise in the district office. However, it is a different model for professional development in that it:



• recognizes that implementation is a process that occurs at the school level and requires on going support for teachers and administrators;
• engages professionals in both theory application and theory building at the same time -- teachers and administrators construct new meaning;



• focuses on classroom issues and challenges traditional approaches to teaching and learning;



• is driven by research and particularly student outcomes;



• recognizes that training is but one component of professional development;



• represents a global, comprehensive approach to professional development that requires new images of leadership and school organization -- team leadership and professional learning;



• provides a role for "insiders" and "outsiders" that is understood by all and which facilitates systems thinking;



• requires that teacher and principal supervision practices be tied to professional development in a meaningful way.




Results of the Learning Organization Project

After only one year in one school, a comprehensive analysis (teacher surveys, observations and interviews) of this approach to school growth and professional development revealed remarkable success relative to both teacher growth and changes in the classroom practices (Sheppard & Brown, 1996b). This rural Newfoundland high school had been engaged in school improvement initiatives for a number of years, but had witnessed a steady decline: Student attitudes toward school were generally poor, enrolment in advanced classes were quite low, mathematics scores were lower than the provincial average, student behavior was problematic, and classroom practices were primarily large-group and teacher-directed. The following comment by one teacher is indicative of the professional growth that occurred in the school after adopting the new approach:



It has led to the professional growth of the staff; it has created an air of excitement that did not previously exist ... it has brought about collaboration among staff members; it has ensured a more concrete connection between the school and district office; and has given a focus to professional development efforts. (p.5)

Another comment reveals the changes in classroom practices that are occurring within the context of this emerging model:

I find it quite difficult to put a percentage on the number of teachers using cooperative learning, but what I can tell you is that there is enough use to make me feel uncomfortable about my limited amount of use. It is forcing me to get serious about cooperative learning as a practice that can improve my teaching. (p.4)

Similar findings were revealed in another study (MacDonald, 1997) of an urban elementary school with a staff of 24 teachers, most of whom were mid-career and beyond . Like the school described above, this school had been engaged in school improvement within a learning organization framework for a period of one year. Results of this study revealed that it led to renewed staff emphasis on seeking a better education for all students through teacher leadership and collaborative decision-making. One teacher commented that the new approach contributed to readiness for innovation:

You have to always be looking for ways to improve yourself and be ready for any new programs, technologies, and ideas. This process readies the school by looking for new ideas, getting parent and student input to provide the best school environment. (p.68)

Another stated that efforts at the development of a learning organization in the school led to improved teacher efficacy:

I feel the leadership team has made a big difference. Being on the team made me feel that I was truly a part of hashing out what we were going to do and deciding if it was worthwhile to take back to everyone. I really felt that I was a big part of the staff this year, more so than before. Everything has become better this year, even our discipline. We are all more in consensus than previously. We tried to let everyone in on everything before, but we have really made a conscious effort this year. (p. 69)

In respect to decision-making, a mid-career teacher that had spent most of her career in this school noted a dramatic change:

Our principal brought her personal experiences to her role but over the year this position, I think, has changed dramatically. Now there is less authoritarianism and less decision-making centred in the office.... (p. 71)

Findings from a district wide study conducted at the end of the second year of the learning organization project revealed that the new model of professional development provided the methods and tools that facilitated the exploration of new ideas (Sheppard & Brown, 1996a). These new ideas resulted in changes in the traditional structures, and over time began to change aspirations, skills and capabilities, attitudes, and beliefs. These changes illustrate the claim of Senge et al. (1994) that such "surface movements" lead to change that really matters.

Finally, in addition to the findings reported above that support this as a viable model of professional growth in schools and school districts, results reveal that the following must be considered if this model is to be most effective:

• School Team leadership appears to work best when the principal is recognized as a significant source of leadership as well.




• Leadership is often perceived as administration. If professional development is to occur from a constructivist perspective, it is essential that new images of leadership be developed throughout all levels of the system.

• A desire on the part of senior administrators to shift from an "expert" model to a "constructivist" model of professional development is not readily accepted and may be viewed with some suspicion by other educators throughout the system.

• Institutes directed at team leadership training must include the presentation of methods and tools that assist in the application of theory and must allow practice time in their use.



• On-going support and follow-up with high expectations for change in professional development approaches are essential.




• Administrative structures which limit teacher flexibility, and inhibit collaboration and team planning can be major obstacles to the development of newer models of professional development that are consistent with the continuous learning cycle of a learning organization.

• Student outcomes must drive the entire process.



Conclusion

If educators are to accept the lessons related to professional development presented herein, they must be committed to both individual and organizational learning. While it is clear that individuals can learn without any contribution from the organization, it is also apparent that learning can be helped or hindered by the organization. Additionally, because schools are human endeavours, it makes intuitive sense that organizational learning will not occur unless individual are learning. This interactive model of learning in which individuals and the organization are interdependent requires a new constructivist approach to professional development that has its foundation in research and theory. Also, it requires systems thinking and a focus on student outcomes. Our current mental images of professional development must be challenged, and new images must be constructed in order for our schools to become centres of continuous learning that will serve our students in the new millennium.

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1. The headings are direct quotations from Fullan's "Eight Basic Lessons of the New Paradigm of Change" (pp.21-40). The descriptions are extracts from and summaries of the main ideas.

2. The headings are taken directly from Guskey, 1994, pp. 44-46, but the discussion summarizes the main ideas of Guskey, and integrates ideas from Fullan (1993) and Stoll & Fink (1996).



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