Mark A. Smylie

The Enhancement Function of Staff Development: Organizational and Psychological Antecedents to Individual Teacher Change

The purpose of this study was to examine previously unexplored relationships among the organizational contexts of schools and classrooms, teachers’ psychological states, and change in individual teacher practice through staff development unassociated with school or district innovation. A path model, based on theories of individual behavior and change within organizations, is presented and tested using a sample of teachers who voluntarily participated in a staff development program aimed solely at improving individual teacher practice. The findings from the path analysis suggest that, in the absence of organizational foci and pressures for change associated with school or district innovation, individual change is a direct function of personal teaching efficacy. The findings suggest indirect influences on individual change of teachers’ certainty about practice, the concentration of low-achieving students in teachers’ classrooms, and the interactions teachers have with their colleagues about instruction. The implications of these findings for efforts to enhance individual teachers’ practice are discussed.

Teacher Leadership: Tensions and Ambiguities in Organizational Perspective

This article presents the findings of an exploratory study of teacher leadership roles in a metropolitan K-8 school district. These findings suggest that the development and performance of these roles are mediated by the organizational contexts in which they are established. They thus suggest that teacher leadership should be approached as an issue of organizational development rather than solely as an issue of individual empowerment.

Teacher Participation in School Decision Making: Assessing Willingness to Participate.

Increasing teacher involvement in school decision making ranks among the most promising educational reform strategies. Yet empirical data about the conditions under which teachers will actually participate, if given the opportunity, are quite limited. This article explores the organizational and psychological antecedents to teachers’ willingness to participate in personnel, curriculum and instruction, staff development, and general administrative decisions. Findings reveal that teachers vary in their willingness to participate in different decisions and that teacher-principal working relationships exert the greatest significant influence on willingness to participate across decision areas. Findings also suggest that willingness to participate may turn on reconciling competing professional beliefs and working relationships.

The role of the principal in fostering the development of distributed leadership

In this article, the role that formal leaders play in helping distributed leadership take root and flourish in schools is explored. The focus of the study is an urban middle school, one of six cases in a larger three-year investigation of distributed leadership in two mid-Atlantic states. Using interview and document-based data, the authors illustrate ways in which the principal of Glencoe Middle School worked to overcome cultural, structural and professional barriers to create a leadership dense organisation.

Research on Teacher Leadership: Assessing the State of the Art

Teacher leadership has become a key element of recent initiatives to reform schools. Opportunities for teacher leadership have come from an array of new programs and policies. They have come from career ladder and teacher mentoring programs. They have come from policies that designate master and lead teachers to direct school improvement. They have also come from efforts of administrators to decentralize and share decision-making authority (Smylie & Denny, 1990).

Self-Regulation in Democratic Communities

In this article we examine self-regulation as a nonacademic outcome of schooling and assess school- and community-based programs and practices that aim to promote it. From Deweyan and Vygotskian perspectives, self-regulation is conceived broadly as the product of reciprocal person-context relations. It is defined as the planful pursuit of goals that is flexible and promotes individual growth and social change. Self-regulation is characterized by 3 types and levels of person-context interactions: (1) internalization and close personal relations, (2) empowerment and contingent environments, and (3) future orientation and social capital. We examine how self-regulation develops and is supported within and across these types of person-context interactions using Bronfenbrenners ecological model of human development. Implications for 2 aspects of social change-cultural enrichment and social transformation for the promotion of democratic communities-are explored.

Distributed Leadership as Work Redesign: Retrofitting the Job Characteristics Model.

In this article, we revive work redesign theory, specifically Hackman and Oldhams Job Characteristics Model (JCM), to examine distributed leadership initiatives. Based on our early observations of six schools engaged in distributed leadership reform and a broad review of literature, including empirical tests of work redesign theory, we retrofit the JCM by: (1) adding more transition mechanisms to explain how changes in work could lead to the widespread performance of leadership functions; (2) accounting for distributed leadership reform as a group work redesign; and (3) enumerating relevant contextual variables that should impact the development, shape, and success of such reforms.

Restructuring Schools for Improving Teaching

This chapter focuses on the complicated relationship between school restructuring and the improvement of classroom teaching. The analysis examines the causal mechanisms linking restructuring and classroom change, reviews empirical research on the impact of restructuring of teaching, and concludes with an assessment of the potential for improving instruction.

Teacher Support for Career Enhancement Initiatives: Program Characteristics and Effects on Work.

This article examines the critical issue of teacher support for career enhancement initiatives, focusing specifically on merit pay and career ladder programs. It presents the findings of an empirical study that examines the relationships between program characteristics and effects on work variables and teacher support of and opposition to these programs. The findings reveal that teacher support of and opposition to both programs is strongly associated with perceived effects on different dimensions of work. Of particular importance are effects on professional working relationships with other teachers. These findings underscore incongruities and tensions between merit pay and career ladder programs and beliefs and practices that characterize and govern teachers’ work. Implications for the continued development of merit pay, career ladder, and other teacher career enhancement initiatives are explored.

College tuition costs and early career socioeconomic achievement: do you get what you pay for?

The effects of college tuition costs on early career educational, occupational and economic achievements were estimated for a national sample of black and white college students. The findings suggest that attending a relatively high tuition college has a net positive influence on such outcomes as educational attainment, occupational status, income and womens entry into sex-atypical careers. These effects remained significant even when controls were made for student background characteristics (e.g., socioeconomic origins, secondary school achievement, educational and occupational aspirations); the academic selectivity, private/public control, size and graduate orientation of the college attended; and ones specific college experiences (e.g., academic major, academic achievement and social involvement). The findings are discussed in terms of several plausible causal mechanisms.