Moral Leadership in the 21st Century: Everyone Is Watching—Especially the Students

Educational leaders continually must be vigilant about their actions as they speak volumes about the values that the leader supports. It is impossible for an educational leader to take an action without generating some comment about how things should be done—which by definition is moral action. What's more, everyone is watching—especially the students.

This article explores leadership relationships, interrelationships, and interdependence—and how administrative “moral leadership” rests with the institution's leader. First, it examines the concept of systems thinking to determine how relationships, support structures, and decisions made by school leaders impact the entire school—especially the students and the community at large. Second, it explores and furthers our understanding of moral leadership models by synthesizing concepts in the literature and offers a new paradigm of moral leadership for educational leaders in the 21st century.     

The intellectual capital of schools: analysing government policy statements on school improvement in light of a new theorization

Ideology without competence is a dangerous vice. But competence without ideology is a limited virtue. (D. Miliband, Minister of State for School Standards, DfES)     

After Care: the education and occupation of adults who have been in care

abstract

Data from the 1981 and 1991 sweeps of the National Child Development Study are used to explore the educational qualifications and the subsequent occupations of people who had experienced care as children. The results confirm previous investigations which show that people who have been in care have much lower educational qualifications than their peers who have never been in care; they also show that they have higher risks of unemployment and, if they obtain jobs, are more likely to be in lower‐level jobs. These results do not, however, apply equally to all people who have ever been in care. People who experienced short periods of care before the age of one perform close to the national average, while one of the most disadvantaged groups are people who came into care before eleven years of age and did not leave care until after eleven. This group typically remained in care for around nine years, and they not only had low educational attainments but also had even lower occupational attainments than would have been expected given their lack of qualifications.     

The information seeking behaviour of the users of digital scholarly journals

The article employs deep log analysis (DLA) techniques, a more sophisticated form of transaction log analysis, to demonstrate what usage data can disclose about information seeking behaviour of virtual scholars – academics, and researchers. DLA works with the raw server log data, not the processed, pre-defined and selective data provided by journal publishers. It can generate types of analysis that are not generally available via proprietary web logging software because the software filters out relevant data and makes unhelpful assumptions about the meaning of the data. DLA also enables usage data to be associated with search/navigational and/or user demographic data, hence the name ‘deep’. In this connection the usage of two digital journal libraries, those of EmeraldInsight, and Blackwell Synergy are investigated. The information seeking behaviour of nearly three million users is analyzed in respect to the extent to which they penetrate the site, the number of visits made, as well as the type of items and content they view. The users are broken down by occupation, place of work, type of subscriber (“Big Deal”, non-subscriber, etc.), geographical location, type of university (old and new), referrer link used, and number of items viewed in a session.     

Synchronized analysis model: Linking Gilbert's behavior engineering model with environmental analysis models

Performance technology has many analysis models and selecting which to use can be challenging. Arguably, the most prestigious and most used HPT model—a cause analysis model—is Gilbert's behavior engineering model (BEM). However, even this powerful cause analysis model has its limits; although it does examine environmental symptoms in general, it doesn't account for the organizational or environmental levels at which performance problems occur. For data on such levels the practitioner may turn to environmental analysis models such as those developed by Kaufman, Langdon, Rummler & Brache, or Rothwell. But the practitioner who uses both a cause analysis model and an environmental analysis model will be left with two sets of data that do not easily integrate into a useful guide to action. The model presented here—the synchronized analysis model (SAM)— is an effort to remedy this situation. By integrating the cause analysis model of Gilbert's BEM with levels derived from the environmental analysis models, the SAM offers the practitioner an enhanced tool for resolving performance problems.     

One-trial context fear conditioning with immediate shock: The roles of transport and contextual cues

In three experiments, using a total of 120 albino rats, we assessed whether transportation cues might evoke some of the freezing (i.e., defensive immobility) that we see in a context on a day following a footshock given immediately after placement in that context. The results suggested that immediate shock could directly condition strong fear to both simulated and actual transport cues. Although conditioning to transport cues explains some of the freezing that is seen on the test day, it does not explain all of it. We also found evidence that some of the freezing is due to conditioning to permanent features of the context in which the immediate shock is given. The results support a role for transport cues in theories of context conditioning and argue against shock-processing accounts of the conditioning deficit that results from immediate shock.