Search results

School improvement planning has been a central part of school improvement initiatives for decades. Evidence suggests, however, that traditional planning processes are regularly superficial. In the USA, some principals have begun developing short-cycle planning designed to encourage school leadership teams and staff to develop, monitor and adjust plans throughout the academic year.

In this study of eight schools in one urban district, the authors analyzed multiple rounds of short-cycle improvement plans and principal interview data to assess the progress schools made implementing plans over the course of a semester, the ways in which plans were monitored and adjusted and the extent to which principals embraced short-cycle planning.

The authors found that many tasks from first semester plans were completed, which informed the development of plans for the second semester. Observational data were primarily used to monitor plan completion, although principals engaged in monitoring but relied on their leadership team to do so. Principals reported regular engagement with plans throughout semester, but plans were seldom adjusted within a semester.

The findings suggest that short-cycle planning is potentially a viable alternative to traditional annual planning as principals communicated being more engaged and adaptive. Still, the evidence also indicated that old habits might be hard to break as school leaders did not monitor and adjust plans frequently enough to guide improvement efforts in relative “real time.”

Limited research on root cause analysis exists in educational leadership. Accurately diagnosing and detailing root causes—the why—of organizational failure, as is relatively common in other fields, could improve principals' ability to devise situationally- and contextually-responsive solutions in their improvement plans. In this study, the authors analyze school improvement plans to provide insight into how principals use root cause analysis to identify their and their school's failures as a way to respond strategically with goals and action steps.

In this exploratory qualitative study, the authors develop coding schemes and leverage an existing rubric of school improvement plan quality to assess what principals identify as root causes for 216 priorities across 111 school improvement plans.

The overall quality of root causes submitted by principals was low, typically between “beginning” and “developing” stages. The majority of root causes aligned with priorities and desired outcomes, but fewer than one-third had a systems focus. Moreover, less than half of root causes suggested that school leaders played a part in the organizational failures. The vast majority of plans instead identified teachers as the root cause, foundational fault or “why” of the problem.

An increased understanding of root cause analysis conceptualization and development seems necessary if improvement planning is to be a strategic response to a school's most serious organizational challenges. The predominant approach to school improvement planning has focused almost exclusively on how to succeed or become better with little investment in identifying root causes of organizational decline or failure. This initial study of root cause quality in school improvement planning is a key first step in critically thinking about how improvement is to be achieved when failure is unconceived.

School improvement planning, especially for low-performing schools, can be conceptualized as a planning process to strategically improve organizational processes, operations and outcomes. However, bureaucratic procedures and related inflexibilities sometimes results in inauthentic plan development. The purpose of this paper is to analyze the extent and ways in which principals engage in satisficing behavior – or being in the realm of “good enough” – when developing school improvement plans (SIPs).

The authors qualitatively analyzed 364 short-cycle SIPs submitted by principals of 134 low-performing schools participating across three cohorts of a university-based systems leadership program focused on change leadership and school turnaround.

Eight satisficing behaviors in the SIPs were identified. The five most prominent satisficing behaviors follow: plan content is consistent across schools within a district; a plan or plan features are resubmitted; plan priorities focus solely on test scores; plan timeline is insufficiently considered; and the directly responsible individual (DRI) (to complete tasks) is insufficiently considered. Overall, 80 percent of SIPs contained two to four satisficing behaviors, and fewer than ten SIPs were free of such behaviors or, in the authors’ estimation, completely authentic.

The development of SIPs is mandated for the nation’s lowest-performing schools, but little analysis of such plans has been conducted over the last 20 years. Moreover, although the notion that principals engage in satisficing behavior has been raised previously, to the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study to systematically identify ways in which principals satisfice.

One reason for the severe short age of nurses is the un will ing ness of males to pursue the profession in great numbers. This article explores people’s negative stereotypic beliefs about males in the nursing profession. Participants were asked to provide evaluations and trait descriptions of both male and female nurses. The results revealed that both male and female participants harbored favorable impressions of female nurses but unfavorable impressions of male nurses. Male participants were especially likely to form negative evaluations of men who pursue the nursing profession. Exploratory multivariate analyses of trait descriptions revealed that male nurses are viewed as feminine, non traditional, intelligent, and caring. Additional results suggest that unfavorable stereo types of male nurses can be moderated by highlighting the masculine qualities of nurses’ job duties. Implications for the recruitment of males into nursing are discussed.

The purpose of this paper is to uncover the importance of several variables centered around partnership in renewable energy (RE) projects. The concept developed earlier is applied to the project environment to identify interrelations between external and internal drivers, project partnership, resources and project success. A framework consisting of logical chain to project success is proposed.

The study derived the concepts and variables of RE projects’ partnership from the academic literature. The methodology of the case study was used to gain insights in relation to the variables in the logical chain of the proposed framework, suggesting that certain external/internal drivers direct diverse stakeholders to a partnership.

RE technologies are not commodities and require involvement of different stakeholders, who directly or indirectly are impacted by implementation of the RE projects. For the project to be a success, it is critical to involve the stakeholders early in the process and induce partnership synergy, through which dynamic capabilities and implementation mechanisms are capitalized upon as resources to achieve project success.

There appears to be no specific framework directly linking partnership synergy and project success; their relationships are only indirectly inferred. Focusing on project-level activities of public and private stakeholders the paper proposes a framework that conceptualizes relationships among external/internal drivers, partnership, resources and project success/performance. This could be a promising future research direction, helping technology project stakeholders maximize their returns by realizing full advantage of collaboration and partnership

This research seeks to investigate the relationship between product bundling strategies and brand value.

Three studies were conducted, two using student subject pools and another using data collected from online auctions. The impacts of brand and bundling strategy stimuli on the dependent variables product choice and price paid were measured.

Bundles offered by low‐tier brands are more attractive when they are offered in a combined price format than in a partitioned price format. Bundles offered by high‐tier brands are more attractive when they are offered in a partitioned price format than in a combined price format.

The cost of bundle elements to the firm, which may influence consumer reference prices, is not considered in this research. Also, the impacts of bundle pricing strategies are evaluated on the bundles only; the influence of a given strategy on a product portfolio is left for future research.

Firms should consider the status of its brand within its product category before deciding on a bundle pricing strategy.

This research has important implications regarding the pricing of product bundles. It also provides a new perspective on how consumers evaluate product bundles

The wine industry is a multi‐billion product value category worldwide with a significant part being sales through hospitality service providers. Although wine sales add considerably to the profitability of many restaurants, hotels, bars and other hospitality establishments, few studies have been conducted into wine purchasing behaviour within hospitality settings. This study identifies the factors that influence consumers to purchase wine and attempts to demonstrate how the basic demographic characteristic of age is a useful variable for segmentation purposes. The study reveals that there are six dominant factors that influence wine purchasing behaviour and that significant differences in purchase motivation exist between three age segments, 18 to 25 years, 26 to 34 years and 34+years. The results of this research have significant implications for hospitality operators who, with a basic knowledge of the demographic characteristics of their guests, can develop marketing strategies to maximise the sale of wine and wine products.

Wonders whether companies actually have employees best interests at heart across physical, mental and spiritual spheres. Posits that most organizations ignore their workforce – not even, in many cases, describing workers as assets! Describes many studies to back up this claim in theis work based on the 2002 Employment Research Unit Annual Conference, in Cardiff, Wales.