Realizing Sustained School Improvement

Author: Jeanice Kerr Swift Title: REALIZING SUSTAINED SCHOOL IMPROVEMENT Advisor: Dr. Kent Seidel and Dr. Linda Brookhart Degree Date: June, 2011 Developing effective methods for improving America's schools is dependent upon coordinated work of practitioners and researchers. School improvement proves a complicated, confusing and most often troubled process; one characterized by the unprecedented challenges of dramatic societal shift, increasing levels of student need, and ongoing involvement from political and governmental influences. The drive to discover better ways to consistently improve schools is fueled by urgency for dramatic results. This research examines both the macro and the micro levels of the school improvement process and illuminates the need for an intentional new way of thinking and leading. At the macro level, the study examined the need for implementing a systems approach to improve America's schools. The study explored a single school's improvement journey. This work aligned individual and group perceptions of staff members alongside student achievement outcome data framed against the findings in the literature. The study rendered themes from within the reflected experiences of participant educators; the work pointed to the need for an improved social technology, the importance of teams, and shared leadership in the orchestrating of successful school improvement processes, particularly the essential roles of collective listening, learning, and leading to realize transformed outcomes for schools.

Exploring Existentially-Based Interventions For Career Transitions in Sport

From Introduction: Career transition issues have become of increasing interest in the field of sport psychology. Confronting the end of an athletic career is an inevitable reality that every athlete will confront in his or her lifetime (Baillie, 1993), regardless of level of competition (Kerr & Dacyshyn, 2000) or the amount of free choice related to the transition. Many athletes are able to cope with the effects of the transition process effectively, and see retirement as an opportunity to pursue new ventures and identity roles in life. However, retirement from sport can be an event that often results in various adjustment difficulties for an athlete involving emotional, social, financial, and vocational conflicts. Some athletes have reported experiencing effects such as depression, eating disorders, decreased self-esteem, increased suicidality, and substance abuse (Kerr and Dacyshyn, 2000). These types of distress can be exacerbated by the fact that many athletes fail to adequately anticipate and prepare for their impending transition (Baillie, 1993), and often embark on the retirement process without any formalized support (Stier, 2007).Typically, the role of a sport psychologist has been to assist in maximizing an athlete's competitive performance during the course of their career. However, as a sport psychologist's primary responsibility is to serve active competitors and athletic organizations, this tends to come at the expense of failing to provide follow-up care for the athlete as he or she retires from sport (Taylor, Ogilvie, and Lavallee, 2006). Since the 1970's, when the efforts of professionals in European sports organizations first received attention, there has been growing interest in academic circles about career transition

Cover to be unveiled : how meaning is revealed with sheer veils in paintings by Lucas Cranach The Elder

While scholars have questioned the meaning of Lucas Cranach the Elder’s sheer veils when associated with sensual nude figures, research about sheer veils adorning women in a religious context in his paintings has not yet been developed. Through a primarily iconographical approach, I explore who dons each type of veil, and when, to better understand why the same sheer veil is worn differently by various individuals and what that could mean relative to Cranach’s body of work. These veils exhibit artistic prowess, but analysis of their placement on individual figures also reveals how Cranach’s repeated use of sheer veils in his paintings trains the eye on underlying messages, unlocking meanings of these works for Cranach and his patrons and broader themes present in sixteenth century visual culture. My paper initiates this important discussion about how sheer veils – often overlooked in Cranach’s works – are used in both religious and secular contexts.