Leadership and Strategic Management: keys to institutional priorities and planning*

Allocating and managing resources have always been important cornerstones of institutional leadership. Institutional resources include financial, physical and human components. Even in the best of times, it is a challenge to do this effectively. In times of diminished and shrinking resources, distributing these precious commodities across the institutions in the most equitable and productive manner is fraught with complications. As higher education funding streams expand and present more options, they also create new challenges. Leaders today must be well-versed in the emerging realms of philanthropy and entrepreneurialism. Beyond monetary resources, leaders and senior managers must monitor and understand the external environment in order to make discerning decisions about the viability of further infrastructure investments because of changing student demographics or the complexities of personnel within the dynamic culture of social organisations. This article will stress the need for leadership and an institutional planning process as essential prerequisites to effective resource allocations. Portugal will also be discussed as a case study.     

Seeing the ‘new’ in light of the ‘old’: evolving interpretations of a new national English curriculum

This 2‐year longitudinal study explores the process by which three populations of practitioners (mentors, co‐ordinators, and teachers) interpreted a national curriculum involving a change in policies for teaching English as a foreign language. The analysis revealed that the process of managing the changes brought about by the new curriculum yielded ‘dialogues of practice’ between ‘old’ and ‘new’. These dialogues engaged mentors, co‐ordinators, and teachers alike in mediating between new understandings and old ones. It addresses the ways in which they made sense of the terminology of the new curriculum in light of the old curriculum, negotiated between new pedagogical content knowledge and ingrained conceptions of subject‐matter teaching, adapted old understandings of testing to new conceptions of performance‐assessment processes, and mediated between their need to preserve a sense of professional competence while feeling destabilized as ‘novices’ as they confronted innovative curricular practices. Participants' strategic need to ‘survive’ the changes resulted in the development of networks to support professional exchange and assist teachers in managing their way through the uncertainty of curricular change.     

Reducing Aggressive Behavior and Increasing Motivation in School: The Evolution of an Intervention to Strengthen School Adjustment

The pervasive links between problem behaviors and school adjustment suggest that effective intervention programs to enhance school adjustment must focus both on decreasing the motivation to aggress and increasing the motivation to achieve. We describe a program of intervention research to improve social behavior and academic motivation in elementary school students organized around principles of attribution theory. Our intervention curriculum initially focused on reducing children's aggression and was then expanded to include enhancing personal responsibility. A series of efficacy and effectiveness studies have demonstrated that children's attributions in both the social and academic domains can be changed with cost-effective, educational strategies. These changes in children's cognitions have reliably produced positive changes in behavior. We conclude with a discussion of the implications of our work for the design of effective interventions.     

Confirmatory factor analysis of the Competitive State Anxiety Inventory-2

The aim of this study was to evaluate the factor structure ofthe Competitive State Anxiety Inventory-2 (CSAI-2) using confirmatory factor analysis. Volunteer participants (n= 1213) completed the CSAI-2 approximately 1 h before competition and the data were analysed in two samples. The hypothesized model showed poor fit indices in both samples independently (Robust Comparative Fit Index: sample A=0.82, sample B =0.84) and simultaneously (Comparative FitIndex = 0.83), suggesting that the factor structure proposed by Martens et al. is flawed. Our findings suggest that a limitation of the Cognitive Anxiety scale derives from phrasing items around the word ‘concerned’ rather than ‘worried’. We suggest that being concerned about an impending performance does not necessarily mean that an athlete is experiencing negative thoughts, but that the athlete is acknowledging the importance and difficulty of the challenge and is attempting to mobilize resources to cope. The present results question the use of the CSAI-2 as a valid measure of competitive state anxiety.