Richard A. Schmuck

Improving Organizational Problem Solving in a School Faculty

The intervention detailed here was aimed at improving the flexible organizational problem solving of a junior high school faculty. It was pointed toward organizational development, not personal change. Even though the emotional reactions of faculty members were considered in designing the training events, our intervention remained fixed on organizational roles and norms and their interrelationships. We hoped to learn whether improved organizational functioning could be produced in a faculty by integrating group training in communication and problem solving with the normal business of the school. We began our intervention just prior to the academic year and returned intermittently until February. Data evaluating the effects of the intervention support the claim that a number of salutary outcomes were at least partly due to the intervention. Movement in favorable directions occurred in a number of concrete, observable organizational changes, in verbally expressed attitudes about the principal and staff meetings, in the kinds of innovations reported, and in the changing organizational norms of the faculty. Strengths and weaknesses of the intervention are discussed.

Democratic Participation in Small-Town Schools

To study democratic participation in small-town schools, over 5 months the authors interviewed and observed local educators, policymakers, and students from 25 districts in 21 states. The article presents data on citizen involvement, administrator-teacher collaboration, teacher collegiality, student voice, and cooperative learning. The democracy that was found had little to do with academic life. The authors conclude with recommendations to enhance democratic participation about academic matters in small-town schools.

Gender Equity: A Critical Democratic Component of America's High Schools:

These writers share their concerns about the treatment of girls in U. S. high schools and make some recommenda tions about what principals can do to address the problem.

Bringing Parents and Students into School Management: A New Program of Research and Development on Organization Development

When Matt Miles and I carried out an extensive international search for OD interventions in schools back in 1970, wed id not come up with any projects in which parents, students, and educators were being simultaneously involved. Of the handful of school OD projects that we did find (Schmuck and Miles, 197 l ) , virtually every practitioner defined the professional staff as being synonymous with the school organization. Students and parents were not included. I t was true that the Educational Change Team (Chesler and Lohman, 1971) was attempting t o engage students with educators, that the Mott Community schools were striving to put parents and teachers into better communication, and that Phil Runkel and I were pilot-testing an OD training program involving parents and educators; nevertheless, there was no project of an OD sort that was bringing parents, students, and educators together for planned organizational change.

Participants as Consultants to Themselves

After several years of working together, Phil Runkel (my colleague) and I surmised that if consultation in OD was to facilitate self renewal at the grassroots level in schools, then it must necessarily break out of the mold of a traditional, hierarchical expert relationship, and move to reduce the inevitable social distance that arises between the consultants and the school’s participants. In the novel, Salinger makes Holden Caulfield believeable as a “catcher in the rye” because Holden poses no social threat to the fictitious children whom he promises to guide as they run through the potentially dangerous fields. We looked toward peer consultation as our metaphor and as a solution to the problem of social distance between consultants and participants.