Building Leadership: The Knowledge of Principals in Creating Collaborative Communities of Professional Learning

Research literature is replete with the importance of collaboration in schools, the lack of its implementation, the centrality of the role of the principal, and the existence of a gap between knowledge and practice--or a "Knowing-Doing Gap." In other words, there is a set of knowledge that principals must know in order to create a collaborative workplace environment for teachers. This study sought to describe what high school principals know about creating such a culture of collaboration. The researcher combed journal articles, studies and professional literature in order to identify what principals must know in order to create a culture of collaboration. The result was ten elements of principal knowledge: Staff involvement in important decisions, Charismatic leadership not being necessary for success, Effective elements of teacher teams, Administrator‘s modeling professional learning, The allocation of resources, Staff meetings focused on student learning, Elements of continuous improvement, and Principles of Adult Learning, Student Learning and Change. From these ten elements, the researcher developed a web-based survey intended to measure nine of those elements (Charismatic leadership was excluded). Principals of accredited high schools in the state of Nebraska were invited to participate in this survey, as high schools are well-known for the isolation that teachers experience--particularly as a result of departmentalization. The results indicate that principals have knowledge of eight of the nine measured elements. The one that they lacked an understanding of was Principles of Student Learning. Given these two findings of what principals do and do not know, the researcher recommends that professional organizations, intermediate service agencies and district-level support staff engage in systematic and systemic initiatives to increase the knowledge of principals in the element of lacking knowledge. Further, given that eight of the nine elements are understood by principals, it would be wise to examine reasons for the implementation gap (Knowing-Doing Gap) and how to overcome it.

Review of the Evidence Used In The Description Of Currently Recognized Cetacean Subspecies

We reviewed the subspecies listed by Rice (1998) and those described since (a total of 49, in 19 species), assessing them against the criteria recommended by the recent Workshop on Shortcomings of Cetacean Taxonomy in Relation to Needs of Conservation and Management (Reeves et al., 2004). The workshop suggested that the subspecies concept can be construed to cover two types of entities: a) lineages diverging but not quite far along the continuum of divergence (still having significant gene flow with another lineage or lineages) to be judged as species, and b) lineages that may well be species but for which not enough evidence is yet available to justify their designation as such. As a criterion for support of a subspecies, the workshop suggested as a guideline that there be at least one good line of either morphological or appropriate genetic evidence. "Appropriate" was not defined; the recommendation was that that be left up to the taxonomist authors of subspecies and to their professional peers. A further recommendation was that evidence on distribution, behavior and ecology should be considered not as primary but as supporting evidence, as there was not agreement at the workshop that such characters are necessarily stable (in the case of distribution) or inherent (behavior and ecology).