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Between 2008 and 2011 academic teaching staff from Leeds Beckett University (UK) and Chainama Hills College of Health Sciences (Zambia) worked together on a Development Partnership in Higher Education (DelPHe) project funded by the Department for International Development (DFID) via the British Council. The partnership focused on “up-scaling” the provision of mental health education which was intended to build capacity through the delivery of a range of workshops for health educators at Chainama College, Lusaka. The project was evaluated on completion using small focus group discussions (FGDs), so educators could feedback on their experience of the workshops and discuss the impact of learning into their teaching practice. This chapter discusses the challenges of scaling up the mental health workforce in Zambia; the rationale for the content and delivery style of workshops with the health educators and finally presents and critically discusses the evaluation findings.

This qualitative study investigated how small group communication influences the development of shared mental models in a committee of public librarians addressing a problem-solving task. It examines the influence of communication themes, functions, roles, and rules on the group's development of shared mental models about the task and about team interaction. Data were collected over the course of a year from group meetings, email messages, group documents, and participant interviews and then analyzed using existing coding schemes and qualitative coding techniques. The findings indicate that within the group there was a strong superficial convergence around the task mental model and the team interaction mental model but a weaker convergence at a deeper level. Analysis of the group communication data shows that the group focused discussion on understanding the problem and identifying tasks, enacting group roles and rules that facilitated sharing information. The functions of their messages focused on task communication. The findings suggest that, in this group, communication themes most heavily influenced the development of a shared mental model about the task, while communication roles, rules, and functions were more influential toward the development of a shared mental model about team interaction. Implications for practice include adopting intentional tactics for surfacing mental models at various points in the group life and anchoring the emerging model within the collective cognition of the group through devices such as narratives, objects, or documentary materials.

Mental model convergence occurs as team members interact. By collecting information and observing behaviors through their interactions, team members’ individual mental models evolve into shared mental models. This process requires a cognitive shift in an individual's focal level. Specifically, the individual assigned to the team must shift his or her focus from thinking about the team domain using an individual perspective to thinking about it from a team perspective. Thus, mental model convergence may be the key to understanding how individuals are transformed into team members. This chapter presents a framework describing the mental model convergence process that draws on the extant research on group development and information processing. It also examines temporal aspects of mental model convergence, the role of mental model contents on the convergence process, and the relationship between converged mental models and team functioning. Preliminary evidence supporting the framework and the important role that converged mental models play in high-performing teams is provided. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the implications of this mental model convergence framework for research and practice.

Special education today in the Ukraine is dramatically different than its early origins which stressed communal guardianship for persons with disabilities to its current movement to inclusive education. The journey to inclusive education was inconsistent due to a variety of elements such as the collapse of the Russian Monarchy, a series of different governments and social-political structures, World War II and membership in the USSR which stressed a unification of the education system. However, special education professionals who worked at the Special Education Pedagogy Institute of the National Academy of Pedagogical Sciences continued to research and develop a philosophical instructional framework to educate students with disabilities that includes theoretical and practical aspects of inclusive education. This chapter provides a detailed description of this framework as well as prevalence and school placements aspects, classification and assessment parameters, and the impact of legislation for free public education. The chapter concludes with challenges to inclusive education such as attitude modification, infusing necessary teacher instructional strategies, and the incorporation of best practices from special education to regular education settings.

Purpose – In this chapter, we propose a process model of emergent multiculturally shared mental models (MSMM) in multiparty negotiation.

Methodology – Building on existing models of collective cognition, we incorporate our research on culture, negotiation, and shared mental models to propose a three-stage model that addresses the unique challenges of a multiparty and multicultural context at each stage.

Implications – The challenges of multiparty negotiation (e.g., increased information load, managing coalitions, etc.) are exacerbated in a multicultural context because negotiators each bring unique approaches and expectations that are grounded in their national cultural values and norms. Our model addresses these complexities and illustrates moderators that can facilitate or hinder the development of a shared understanding in multicultural multiparty negotiation.

Originality – Multicultural multiparty negotiations are common in international business mergers, international peace keeping efforts, and international political, economic, and environmental treaties. This chapter is the first to consider the process of shared cognition in the context of multicultural multiparty negotiations.

Social and environmental accounting research manifests varying levels of awareness of critical global problems and the need to develop alternative approaches to dealing with economy and society. This paper explores Buddhist thought and, specifically, Buddhist economics as a means to informing this debate. We draw on and expand Schumacher's ideas about ‘Buddhist economics’, first articulated in the 1960s. Our analysis centres on Buddhism's Four Noble Truths, the Noble Eightfold Path and associated Buddhist teachings. The examination includes assumptions, means and ends of Buddhist approaches to economics; these are compared and contrasted with conventional economics.To consider how thought and practice may be bridged, we examine a practical application of Buddhism's Middle Way, in the form of Thailand's current work with ‘Sufficiency Economy’.Throughout the paper, we explore the implications for the development of social accounting, looking for mutual interactions between Buddhism and social accounting thought and practice.

In this study, workplace spirituality is discussed in the context of remote work and the COVID-19 pandemic. First, the focus is on the changes in the meaning and function of employees in the organization during the evolutionary process of industrialization and management paradigms. Afterward, conceptual frameworks for spirituality and workplace spirituality are presented, and in the last section, academic studies that deal with workplace spirituality with distance or hybrid work arrangements are included. Early studies offer insights and recommendations on conceptualizing, developing, and managing workplace spirituality. They all emphasize that spirituality is necessary for remote work as a tool to overcome stress and mental health problems and increase employee well-being. Unfortunately, the remote work and workplace spirituality literature is relatively narrow and needs to be expanded.

As the world struggled to come to grips with the Covid-19 pandemic, over twenty scholars, practitioners, and global leaders wrote brief essays for this curated chapter on the role of global leadership in this extreme example of a global crisis. Their thoughts span helpful theoretical breakthroughs to essential, pragmatic adaptations by companies.

Quality-Oriented Education (su zhi jiao yu) is a national education reform initiative that presents ongoing opportunities and challenges to schools, local bureaus of education, and the overall educational system in China today. This chapter seeks to gain insight into if and how Quality-Oriented Education, 10 years into its enactment, has taken root in practice. We posit that a reform agenda is best manifested through well-aligned and operable standards for school effectiveness. We introduce the policy-driven definition for school effectiveness and an evaluation framework depicting the intended focus of Quality-Oriented Education. Using an iterative and inductive process for content analysis, we compare the policy-driven framework with the coding results of a 2009 national inventory of actual school evaluation schemes in 91 Chinese school districts. Our review points out that the new mission of Quality-Oriented Education advocates educational equity, curriculum reform, and systemic support for school-based management. However, at the operational level, there are great variations in terms of content domain, focus, and function among school evaluation schemes with notable regional differences. Furthermore, schools are still caught between the existing system that measures school performance by achievement and the intended accountability scheme that calls for enhanced student ability. This chapter adds to the empirical foundation for the development of a new framework that not only captures the spirit of the national educational reform but also is informed of the developmental needs of schools in drastically different geo-economical and social conditions.

This chapter critiques the concept of play as a part of educational practice in early childhood education. After dissecting a developmentally appropriate statement about play, we present some principles of hermeneutic analysis as an additional way to observe and think about classroom play. The issue of which narrative tale (child, children, community, curriculum, teacher, etc.) any play event might inform is presented. An illustrative case is presented, followed by suggestions for situating play inquiry’s text in context.