The major purpose of this study was to determine the problems that public school systems encounter when attempting to involve principals and teachers in the process of curriculum improvement. A second purpose was to identify the procedures that school systems use to improve curriculum and the extent of principal and teacher involvement in the curriculum decision making process. The study was conducted through two strands of inquiry. The first strand involved the distribution of a Curriculum Improvement Survey to all communities in the state of Rhode Island. Of the thirty-five Directors of Curriculum, twenty-six completed and returned the survey. Their responses provided a broad spectrum from which to view how, individually and collectively, curriculum improvement was being implemented in response to national and state initiatives. The second strand was an ethnographic study of several different committees within a local school community that were involved in various aspects of curriculum improvement. Findings suggest curriculum improvement is a shared responsibility among a cross section of individuals within school systems. The primary initiators and major determinants that influence the curriculum improvement process were identified. Most school systems reported having long range plans for improvement that are guided by administrative regulations and are implemented within varying cyclical time frames. Smaller districts where administrators and teachers wear “different hats” than in larger systems appear to be less formal in their approaches to curriculum change and the improvement process is on-going without regulations. In regard to participation in the process, the survey responses and the plans suggest that principals and teachers are given ample opportunities to participate in decision making to improve curriculum, however, their degree of participation varies with the type of decision they are being asked to make. The major problems in implementing curriculum improvement that were identified by the twenty-six school systems included insufficient time educators’ lack of curriculum theory and practical experiences; insufficient funds; and contractual considerations. The in-depth study of one school system also documented these problems, as well as: the lack of a common language for deliberating and writing curriculum; personal attitudes and professional ability levels that hinder role fulfillment; inequitable treatment of task force committees by administrators; and pressures to serve as a “rubber stamp” for principals and administrators to ensure the fulfillment of their political agendas. Recommendations for future research are suggested to determine ways to strengthen communication between the state and local school levels; to identify how institutions of higher learning may better prepare educators for curriculum leadership; and to examine the role of Director of Curriculum in order to identify leadership characteristics that are essential to curriculum improvement on a system wide basis.

Despite evidence that an understanding of the individual's interpretive framework is an important factor in understanding effective teaching, there is little research in higher education which addresses this variable. The purpose of the study was to facilitate an understanding of the personal context within which the behaviors and strategies of effective teachers exist. Designed as a case study of the University of Massachusetts Amherst Distinguished Teaching Award winners from 1962 to 1995 (N = 47, 69% of total population, representing all of the Schools/Colleges within the University), it employed a written survey to gain data about faculty backgrounds and adoption of teaching attitudes and activities which the literature has identified as characteristic of effective teachers, followed by in-depth interviews (N = 14) to explore the participants' personal constructions of the process of teaching. The major findings include: all participants' definitions of teaching reflected a constructivist orientation to the process; a consistency in participants' definitions of the major goals and processes of teaching, and motivations and rewards for teaching across age, discipline, and sex; close attention to their own and their students' experiences is the primary source of learning about and motivation for teaching; the goal of relating to students is to facilitate learning, thus participants define an appropriate faculty-student distance in their relationships with students; teaching is considered an activity with intellectual value; evidence of individual shifts in the construction of their goals for teaching and of their relationships with students, their content and the context that parallel established schema for epistemological and intellectual development, indicating the possibility of a psychological developmental aspect to the development of effective teachers. Some implications for further research include the need for efforts to clarify possible epistemological developmental aspects to the development of faculty as teachers, to research the connections between developmental stage and teaching effectiveness and conceptualization of efforts to improve teaching as incorporating more than attention to methods.

The local school is the level at which school improvement occurs. The key leaders of the local schools are the principals and they should be involved in improving the curriculum for school improvement. However, principals encounter difficulties. Their role is unclear. They do not possess the necessary skills. To acquire such skills, staff development programs are needed for principals. In this exploratory study, a staff development program was designed and implemented to assist principals to gain curriculum development competencies. A list of fifty-four activities was mailed to eighty-eight Pennsylvania principals to collect their perceptions on the role of the elementary principal in curriculum development. Seventy returned questionnaires were analyzed and the activity identified as most important to their role in curriculum leadership was evaluating classroom instruction. A review of literature was made to determine premises, competencies, and learning conditions to be included in a staff development program. Eight premises were used to construct eight lessons with twenty-four objectives. Seventeen principals completed a needs assessment and pretest to determine competencies they already had and those needing development. Principals participated in workshop sessions to correct weaknesses. After the sessions, principals completed a posttest to determine if they gained the desired competencies, and which aspects of the staff development program were most helpful. The analysis of the posttest data revealed that principals perceived the staff development program to have assisted them in gaining twenty-one objectives. Two objectives were not accomplished with the principals and, therefore, recommendations have been suggested on how to revise the lesson. One objective was previously obtained by all principals who participated in the lesson. Therefore, this objective needs to be evaluated with other principals to determine if it should be deleted or maintained. It was determined, then, that the staff development program benefitted selected principals in gaining curriculum development skills. A recommendation for future study is that this program be implemented with a larger group of elementary principals to determine if it assists them to gain crucial curriculum development skills in a significant and lasting manner.

Effective curriculum planning and decision making process is key to the success of educational programs. The problem with centralized educational systems is that, at the curriculum planning level, the system does not have sufficient data about the needs of the learner, teachers, and the expectations of the society at large for effective curriculum planning to take place. At the implementation level, the system does not give teachers the needed flexibility to implement the curriculum. The major purpose of this study was to investigate curriculum decision making process in Malawi. The research procedures used in this study consisted of systematic document analysis and interviews with selected educators. In addition, a survey of opinions of students, parents, teachers, and heads of schools was conducted. The findings of the study confirmed that the curriculum planning and decision making process in Malawi is centralized. It also found that curriculum planning and development process for the secondary school curriculum was not fully systematised. At the school level, heads of schools and teachers had very little say about the curriculum. The implementation of the curriculum was, therefore, not flexible enough to allow the curriculum to be modified to suit local conditions while at the same time meeting the nationally developed objectives. The following were some of the recommendations the study made: (1) Decisions about the curriculum should be broadly based. (2) The responsibility for national curriculum development should be vested in the hands of the Malawi Institute of Education. (3) The Ministry of Education and Culture should gradually institute a school-based management strategy in order to improve the effectiveness of schools. (4) Lines of communication between the school and the Ministry headquarters should be improved. (5) In order to encourage the application of knowledge and skills into practice, there is need to continue refining performance based assessment techniques for appraising student performance and for placement. It is hoped that the decentralization process now taking place within the education sector, will take into consideration the above recommendations in order to improve the quality of secondary education in Malawi.

The geographic landscape of this study is the Lao Peoples' Democratic Republic, also known by its French name Laos. Located in Southeast Asia, the Lao PDR is one of the six remaining socialist countries in the world. During my fieldwork in the Lao PDR, I facilitated a process of action research with a group of Lao INGO workers. I used qualitative research methods to capture the perceptions of the Lao development workers who collaborated with this study. This dissertation is primarily based on the data documented through interviews, participant observation, focus group discussion and reflective story writing. The core educational problem is to examine the historical reasons for the modest educational infrastructure in the Lao PDR and its impact on the growth of the development sector. The other related issues I explored include the limitations of mainstream development and educational models as well as the opportunities emerging as a result of the country's integration with the globalization process. Within the backdrop of the problem mentioned, the main purpose of this study is to explore an alternative strategy that has potential to facilitate the growth of local human resource capacity. The rationale for this exploratory endeavor is to generate functional knowledge that will potentially assist the policy makers and practitioners to develop an appropriate approach for the local human resource capacity building process. The research method I adapted in the field was a combination of action research and phenomenological inquiry. The key question that I pursued was “What is the process of collaborative capacity building that includes an alternative educational approach and model which have the potential to help Lao INGO staff to increase their capacity as development workers and, in the longer term, develop skills for self-management?”. I employed four techniques of data collection, which included interviewing 26 individuals, documenting action research process through the participant observation method, assisting Lao INGO staff to write reflective stories and conducting three focus group discussions. During the data analysis stage, I tried to incorporate the voices of the participants of the action research project to allow them constructing their way of knowing.