Effective Schools Process (SM) Modules
The Effective Schools Process (SM) follows a generic organizational development methodology, applying to the specific requirements of schools and school systems the stages in a process developed in the second half of the 20th C. from sociology and psychology and applied successfully elsewhere to communities, businesses, churches, libraries, etc.
For example, Jeffrey J. Gardner of the Office of Management Studies, Association of Research Libraries (Washington, DC), authored a Resource Notebook on Planning (1981), ERIC 191476. This includes "a framework of management review and analysis self-study procedures...." Rather than the profit motive as in business, in libraries and in schools the mission is to assure that indeed all students can have access to information and learn, respectively, by organizing around these ends.
By 1991 NCESRD's leaderhsip had created a group of nine modules based on the latest research in education and in the related fields that fit together to make a manual, analoguous to ones employed in libraries (such as Gardner's Resource Notebook...) and in other types of organizations. The manual provides a process for implementing the changes needed to meet the goals. This is the loose-leafed, binder-housed Participant's Notebook: School-based Instructional Leadership: Staff Development for Teacher and School Effectiveness, ed. Edie D. Holcomb. Madison: U. of Wisconsin for the National Center for Effective Schools Research and Development, 1991, vii, 595 pp. This school based instructional leadership (SBIL) is the "how-to" part of implementing Effective Schools ideals and goals. A related management information system for Effective Schools (MISES) addresses the challenge of managing the data gathered in the SBIL process. These are described and related to each other in The Effective Schools Process by Richard Rossmiller, Edie L. Holcomb, and Donald N. McIsaac Madison: NCESRD, 1993, 22 pp., linked to in the categories outline, 6.2.
Arthur H. Miller
July 6, 2010