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The paper presents a process of development of the capacity of resources used in the improvement of an organization. The purpose of this paper is to determine the conditions in which the development of the improvement capacity is sustainable.

As the basis for the study, the following prerequisites have been adopted: potential effects of the use of resources in a process can be expressed by their capacity, which involves the productivity and volume of the resources; a model of sustainability of improvement is based on the procedure ABC and principle of continuous improvement; an improvement process involves two components: subject matter (eliminating problems) and methodical (learning how to eliminate problems during the execution of subject matter tasks) projects; the methodology of Six Sigma can be a reference model, which is studied to identify and interpret elements and relationships that are characteristic for the process of sustainable development.

There have been formulated a model of the process of developing the improvement capacity in which the subject matter and methodical tasks are coupled, a model of the Six Sigma process that refers to the features of the process of development of the improvement capacity and three principles for sustainable development of improvement capacity.

The principles refer to decisions on the improvement process made at basic (strategic, tactical and operational) levels of an organization.

Elementary schools have been confronted with large-scale educational reforms as strategies to improve the educational quality. While building school-wide capacity for improvement is considered critical for changing teachers’ classroom practices, there is still little empirical evidence for link between enhanced school capacity for improvement and instructional change. In this study, the authors examined the impact of school improvement capacity on changes in teachers’ classroom practices over a period of time. Leadership practices, school organizational conditions, teacher motivation and teacher learning were used to measure school-wide capacity for improvement. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

Mixed-model analysis of longitudinal data over a four years (2005-2008) period of time from 862 teachers of 32 Dutch elementary schools were used to test the impact of school improvement capacity on changing teachers’ instructional practices.

The results showed that organizational-level conditions and teacher-level conditions play an important, but different role in changing teachers’ classroom practices. Whereas teacher factors mainly affect changes in teachers’ classroom practices, organizational factors are of significant importance to enhance teacher motivation and teacher learning.

More longitudinal research is needed to gain better insight into the opportunities and limits of building school-wide capacity to stimulate instructional change.

By encouraging teachers to question their own beliefs, facilitating opportunities for teachers to work together to solve problems, and through the promotion of shared decision making, school leaders can reinforce the personal and social identification of teachers with the organization. As a consequence, teachers will feel increasingly committed and are more willing to change their classroom practices. Additionally, school leaders can use the findings from this study and the related instrument as a tool for school self-evaluation.

This paper contributes to a deeper understanding of the nature of changes in conditions for school improvement and its influence on changes in teachers’ instructional practices over a period of time.

The purpose of this paper is to focus on challenges faced by longitudinal quantitative analyses of school improvement processes and offers a systematic literature review of current papers that use longitudinal analyses. In this context, the authors assessed designs and methods that are used to analyze the relation between school improvement processes and student outcomes. Based on this the authors point out to what extent the papers consider different aspects of the complex nature of school improvement (e.g. multilevel structure, indirect and nonlinear effects, reciprocity). The choice of study designs and methods of analysis substantially determines which aspects of this complexity are taken into account.

The authors searched in four international high-impact journals and in ERIC for articles reporting longitudinal school improvement studies. The database of the review consisted of a total of 428 journal articles. In total, 13 of the 428 papers met the selection criteria and were analyzed in detail.

The analyzed papers use a wide range of designs and methodological approaches. They support the assumption that sophisticated quantitative longitudinal designs and methods can be applied effectively in school improvement research. However, considering the complexity of school improvement is accompanied by high demands on designs and methods. Due to this none of the papers met the standards applied in this review completely.

In particular, further research is needed to consider a long period of observation, reciprocal indirect and nonlinear processes in a multilevel structure. Moreover, research is required for a better and unambiguous theoretical foundation and empirical validation of the number of and intervals between measurement points.

If more consideration is given to the complex nature of school improvement in future studies, the broader knowledge base will allow a better understanding of the dynamic relation of school improvement and student learning. It would thus be possible to make more appropriate recommendations for the support of school improvement practice.

The original contribution of the paper is to show which aspects of the complexity of school improvement processes – and to what extent – are currently addressed in designs and methods of analysis applied in quantitative longitudinal studies that investigate the relation between schools’ capacity to managing change and student outcomes. Additionally the authors aim at deriving need for further research and giving guidelines how designs and methods in further studies can reflect the complexity appropriately. It is highly important to consider all aspects of this complexity to describe and understand the dynamic relation of school improvement processes and student outcomes.

The subjects considered in this research paper form the basic prerequisites for improving the effectiveness of organizational development. The author assumes that the effectiveness of any process depends on the size of the reserve of capacity of the resources used in the process (for details, see Appendix). The purpose of this paper is to determine the conditions for the effectiveness of improvement projects.

The author has constructed an algorithm (called ABC) to control the capacity of resources. With its help, the author defines the strategy for improvement in an organization. The basic principle of this strategy is continuous improvement, and tactics to control resources refers to the ABC algorithm.

The author shows that continuous improvement is a prerequisite for the effectiveness of this strategy. It is shown that the features of this strategy reflect sustainable development of the organization. Along with the algorithm ABC, it forms a basis for the sustainable development strategy. The author shows conditions for effectiveness and explains how the strategy shapes the sustainable development of the organization. The author also explains why commitment of top management is necessary, what it is, and how it can benefit the organization.

This effort is symbolized by the involvement of resources in projects conducted to improve organizational functions. The result of the capacity growth is increased ability to confront new challenges.

The author claims that the strategy for sustainable development is shaping the conditions for a gradual increase in the capacity of the resources used in the improvement process. The growth in resource capacity in the repeatedly run improvement projects can serve as a model of organizational learning. The learning process requires effort.

Quality management (QM) principles define the values of the organizational culture that makes people focus on quality assurance and improvement. However, the formulation of the principles of the ISO 9000 standard published in 2000–2015 is more like a list of things to remember that result from the development of QM methodologies, rather than systematic guidelines to follow. Their ambiguity does not facilitate understanding and can lead to activities that do not bring benefits to the organization. The purpose of this paper is to formulate such a system of directives that when implemented allows achieving the desired level of effectiveness of the organization’s processes with increased efficiency, and some measures can be assigned that show the progress of implementation.

The resource capacity reserve was adopted as the main factor ensuring the effectiveness of the planned tasks. A systemic analysis of relationships between the QM principles and the categories of Deming’s system of profound knowledge was carried out. Some factors referred to in the principles have been distinguished. The conditions necessary to achieve their positive impact on the capacity of organization’s resources have been formulated in terms of some directives for management processes. The interaction of the components of variability in organization processes with the factors was discussed.

Eight directives for effectiveness management (EM) have been established. They define independent dimensions in the management tactics for the development of the organization’s resources necessary to ensure and increase the effectiveness of the organization’s processes. The implementation of the tactics defined by EM directives, assuming randomness in processes, consists in the demonstration of care for trust within the organization, organization development and confidence in the organization of external partners.

Two key QM functions, quality assurance and improvement, are implemented in management processes in order to provide a balance between available capacity and tasks allocated to the organization’s processes, and increase the available capacity by eliminating gaps in knowledge used to control resources in the processes. The EM directives show the role of the organization’s knowledge and stakeholder commitment in providing the necessary complement to the capacity available in the organization. The confidence in the organization is shown as a key premise for access to the commitment of stakeholders. They also show that QM functions would be unnecessary or trivial if one could eliminate random variation from processes in the organization.

The purpose of this study is to examine how a school leadership team in a rural, high-poverty elementary school learned to lead continuous school improvement in a research–practice partnership.

This case study draws on qualitative research methods, improvement science and Deming's notion of a system of profound knowledge to identify how members of the school leadership team understood and approached their school improvement work differently as a result of engaging in continuous improvement processes in a research–practice partnership.

The findings illustrate how engaging in continuous improvement processes in the research–practice partnership enhanced the leadership team members' capacities to prioritize and solve problems, incorporate multiple and diverse perspectives in problem-solving efforts and establish a culture of increased risk-taking and ownership of teaching and learning outcomes. In sum, the members of the leadership team became the drivers of their own change processes.

The findings provide insight into how leaders in rural, high-poverty schools can build capacity within their schools to meet the demand for increased student achievement by leading collaborative, continuous improvement processes grounded in improvement science in research–practice partnerships.

The purpose of this study is to test the validity of using collective trust as a social indicator of instructional capacity.

A hypothesized model was advanced for the empirical investigation. Collective trust was specified as a latent construct with observable indicators being principal trust in faculty (PTF), faculty trust in principal (FTP), faculty trust in colleagues (FTC), and faculty trust in students (FTS). It was hypothesized that enabling school structure is directly related to the latent collective trust construct and collective trust is directly related to school performance. Data were collected in the spring of 2010/11 from teachers and students in 85 schools in an urban school district in a southwestern state. A partially latent structural regression model was tested in AMOS 7.0.

Results of the measurement model support the theoretical relationship among faculty trust in principal, faculty trust in colleagues, faculty trust in students, and principal trust in faculty. Both directional hypotheses were supported: enabling school structure had a strong, direct effect on a culture collective trust and collective trust had a strong, direct effect on school performance.

The sample consisted of schools in one urban district in the southwestern part of the USA, and collective trust only operationalized the social dimension of instructional capacity.

Regular and consistent measures of collective trust have the potential to improve how administrators at site and district levels manage the implementation of improvement strategies designed to build capacity.

Many theoretical discussions treat trust as a constitutive property of capacity building, but few studies have empirically tested a priori models that specify relationships among structures and processes aligned with instructional capacity, collective trust, and school performance.

Electroless plating treatment is one surface modification technique. An added effect due to electroless plating is expected, and the vibration damping capacity of the structures may be improved by this technique. In the present study, the vibration damping capacity of such electroless plated structures is measured experimentally. Damping capacity can be improved regardless of the plated film materials. Improvement efficiency with an electroless plating film with dispersed foreign particles such as SiC ceramics is higher than with a uniform electroless plating film.

The purpose of this study is to investigate the relationship between government and Balinese society in tax decentralization through budgeting seem to insignificantly improve the welfare of Balinese society.

This research was conducted in Bali Province involving eight regencies and one city. The data used in this study were secondary data, derived from relevant institutions or from websites through internet browsing and other documentations in the form of official reports/publications, such as regional budget, accountability reports, regional regulations and documents on budget and development of the regional economy. The present research used the partial least squares analysis technique.

Fiscal decentralization does not necessarily lead to better budget management. The success of fiscal decentralization can be found in the quality of the regional budget and the quality of budget management. The allocation of the regional budget for public service improvement and the development of infrastructure will increase the economic capacity of the regions. Improvement in regional economic capacity encourages the improvement of community welfare.

This income inequality points to the issue of fiscal capacity. The development of the financial role of district/city regions in the Province of Bali remains at a level gap with the development level of community welfare. During this period, the financial role of the government as estimated from the ratio of the national budget to the regional budget is higher than that of the society development. The acceleration role of the government is not proportional to the development of Human Development Index outcomes.

Emotions of school leaders influence school culture and structure. Understanding emotions is under-researched and under-theorized in non-western contexts, especially during educational change. The purpose of this paper is to understand the nature of the leadership team’s (LT’s) emotional responses to change, their coping strategies and conditions that maintain their commitment to change.

The study used intrinsic case study research, drawing on data from interviews and a focus group that illuminated perceptions of the LT in a school. The data set was analyzed following the general inductive approach.

The LT’s experienced three critical incidents (CI) of educational change that provoked a range of intense negative and positive emotions, a national curriculum reform. Despite the team’s attempt to cope with the national curriculum reform (i.e. CI1), negative emotions and unsupportive conditions challenged their commitment to change. In CI2, supportive conditions and effective personal coping strategies helped elicit positive emotions, which led to sustained commitment to change. Emotions experienced during the capacity-building program (i.e. CI3) were predominantly positive due to support from the school principal and coaches, resulting in sustained commitment to change.

Findings from this small-scale case study in Lebanon are not generalizable to other contexts. The time lag could have affected the recollection of experiences. All participants were female, and their experiences might not reflect those of other school members affected by the changes.

Examining emotions during change uncovers insight into school leaders’ subjective experience, facilitates a more nuanced understanding of change, and supports change implementation. Considering emotions during change informs the development of tailored interventions that provide effective support.

This study examines how emotions affect the success of educational change. Contrary to common understanding, change does not always generate negative emotions that impede implementation. School-based improvement creates structural and cultural conditions for effective change as it considers practitioners’ socio-emotional needs, eliciting positive emotions.