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The purpose of this study is to evaluate the effectiveness of “Connect the circle” systems thinking tools for improving contextualised systems thinking from sustainability perspectives. The guiding question is could “Connect the circle” improve sustainability education?

The effect of the “Connect the circle” tool on the development of learning dimensions, especially improved problem understanding, shared vision and quality of communication in STEM modules, was analysed by qualitative and quantitative methods.

Authors find that “Connect the circle” is an effective tool for thinking skills development. However, scaffolding in education is required to achieve higher-order thinking skills by empowering students to become active agents of change, capable of envisioning and implementing sustainable solutions at multiple levels.

Educators must bridge gaps between systems theory and understanding how systems thinking skills should be developed in sustainability contexts. Insights from this research will support the development of knowledge and skills required for higher education institutions graduates to address complex sustainability issues.

Applying this tool to STEM curricula represents an original way to explain student holistic vision to connect systems theory to the application of systems thinking skills for sustainability change.

Success is achieving one's goals. To become successful goal setting is essential. The very small number of people who set believable goals are the same very small number of people who become successful. These successful people use the mental laws which prevail in the world of achievement to get what they want.

This chapter examines the potential and barriers for evidence-based practices in Californian schools. In a large and complex school system, the state plays an important role in legitimating the use of certain types of evidence, but evidence-based practices are heavily determined by the resources, actors, and prevailing cultures in a local district environment. Until recently, high-stakes accountability policies mandated improvements in student test performance and intrusive interventions for failure. In recent years, the state has shifted to a different accountability approach that emphasizes local control and the use of multiple measures of school performance to pursue continuous improvement around locally developed goals and interventions. Amid this context, two stories arise about evidence-based practices in California. In one story, a set of major and highly touted districts have led the way in demonstrating evidence-informed continuous improvement district-wide. In these districts, the new state accountability approach, enabling leadership, long-term commitments to collective learning, networked opportunities to learn, and access to elite external expertise have contributed to fairly extensive practices of disciplined team problem-solving involving rich data. In a second story, schools and districts that face resource scarcity, high turnover, and conflict and in which past high-stakes accountability left a deep imprint on prevailing norms and routines, leaders and teachers have had difficulty establishing a conducive context for collective learning. However, given ingrained practices and limited absorptive capacity, it is not entirely clear how to enable productive evidence-based practices in such contexts.

Research, spanning half a century, points to the critical role of school administration and to the successful implementation of US government policies and programs. In part these findings reflect the times and a US educational governance system characterized by local control, a constitutionally‐constrained federal government, resource‐poor state governments, and an overall system of segment arrangements for governing education. However, the US education policy environment has changed dramatically over the past several decades, with standards and high stakes accountability becoming commonplace. The purpose of this paper is to examine the entailments of shifts in the policy environment for school administrative practice, focusing on how school leaders manage in the middle between this shifting external policy environment and classroom teachers.

The paper's focus is on how school administration manages the dual organizational imperatives of legitimacy and integrity in a changing institutional environment. This paper is an essay in which the authors reflect on the entailments of shifts in the education sector for school administration over the past quarter century in the USA.

While considerable change for school administrative practice is suggested, the authors argue that organizational legitimacy and organizational integrity are still central concerns for school leaders.

Although the paper's account is based entirely on the US education sector, several aspects of the framing may be relevant in other countries.

The purpose of this paper is to use empirical data on new principals to clarify the connection between different succession situations and the challenges their successor principals face.

The study draws on two waves of interview data from a random sample of 16 new elementary school principals in a major urban school district in the USA.

New principals face distinct practice challenges depending on the nature of their successions. The less planned the succession, the less information and knowledge the new principal tends to possess. The more discontinuous the new administration’s trajectory is with the previous administration, the greater the staff resistance that the successor principal tends to face.

Few studies systematically examine how succession situations differ in schools that are in need of transformation vs those in need of stability. This study addresses this gap by illuminating the varied processes of succession and highlighting specific mechanisms that link these processes to different organizational trajectories.

For district officials, this study suggests that principals in unplanned successions need greater support in quickly gathering information about their new schools while principals in discontinuous successions need greater expertise in how to balance trust-building and accountability in their attempts to promote transformational change.

This study’s primary value is its detailed articulation of how certain characteristics of succession situations are associated with specific types of challenges. Only studies at this level of specificity can be effective guides to practitioners and policymakers who are charged with preparing, selecting, and supporting new principals and their schools.

The purpose of this paper is to examine what factors affect student achievement in reading and mathematics. The research questions addressed the perceptions of school principals and background characteristics related to student achievement in Korea and the USA with respect to differences among students in low, middle and high quantiles.

Data were taken from the Program for International Student Assessment 2012. Scores in the reading and mathematics were analyzed in conjunction with a principal survey. The Quantile Regression method was used for data analysis with three quantile points. T-statistics were used to test for significance. The predictor set consisted of seven school-leadership variables, and four to six additional covariates.

The most important finding for the USA was a relationship between organizational hindrance (HND) and low student achievement for the middle and upper quantiles in mathematics and for all quantiles in reading. The (HND) variable included poor teacher-student relations, low expectation of students, overly strict enforcement of rules, lack of attention to student needs, resistance to change, lateness to class, and lack of preparation. The most important finding for Korea was that there were significant associations across all groups between teacher attitude (TCHATT) and student reading achievement and with the low group in mathematics.

This study adds to knowledge about school capacity and suggests that the leadership role of the principal is to overcome negative environmental factors and create a positive organization.

The non-Gaussian approach of regression analysis allowed us to identify significant differences that we otherwise might not have found.

D.H. Lawrence thought Lady Chatterley’s Lover was his best and most important novel. Yet he had to pay to have it privately printed. His publishers thought his sexual descriptions and language were obscene under the censorship laws of the UK and the USA, and they were right. From 1928 until 1959 no‐one could legally publish or sell the unexpurgated novel, and copies were subject to confiscation. All this changed in 1959 when Charles Rembar successfully defended Grove Press’s right to publish the novel. His defense, which rested on a unique interpretation of Justice Brennan’s opinion in Roth v. United States, introduced the redeeming‐social‐value test for obscenity. Within six years it revolutionized American obscenity laws, ensuring that sexual material with even a small measure of social value would enjoy First Amendment protection.

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the district effectiveness literature. It begins by summarizing the school effectiveness research, the correlates of effective schools, and the conceptual and methodological characteristics of this field. It then describes the findings from a review of 50 studies of district effectiveness, the most frequently identified correlates of effective districts, and the conceptual and methodological features of this research. From there, it compares and contrasts the two fields, paying attention to the ways in which they frame notions of success, purposes of education, the contextualized nature of school performance, and theoretical explanations for student success.

Data sources for this literature review included 50 primary documents on district effectiveness. The studies were bound to those that presented the original results from investigations of the relationship between district‐level policies, routines, behaviors, or other characteristics and classroom‐level outcomes.

Several themes run through the literature on district effectiveness. These include findings that standards‐aligned curricula, coherent organizational structures, strong instructional leadership, frequent monitoring and evaluation, and focused professional learning lead to higher test scores. Most of these investigations are framed from technical perspectives that explore the relationship between organizational regulations and improved test performance. Less common are inquiries about the socio‐political and normative forces that shape districts’ improvement experiences. One consequence of this technical focus is that the field of district effectiveness has come to share several of the conceptual and methodological properties that characterized the former school‐level research.

The article concludes by discussing the implications for the growing volume of district‐level research on educational leadership, district improvement, and educational equity.

This article details the ways in which a sharp focus on questions of what works in the district effectiveness literature has deepened researchers’ and practitioners’ knowledge of the specific mechanisms that may produce more desirable results in test performance, yet these questions alone, decoupled from corresponding inquiries about the complex, highly contextualized character of higher or lower scoring districts, leave researchers and practitioners vulnerable to the same scholarly and practical pitfalls of their predecessors.

The model and existing practice of the construction supply chain (CSC) in the United Kingdom (UK) and Australia was presented in this chapter. The policies and reports that support the practice of the CSC were examined in both countries. It was discovered from the review of literature that the UK has a more detailed report targeted at improving the CSC than Australia. However, both countries have a common factor affecting their CSC which originates from fragmentation experienced within their supply chain. Construction stakeholders in the UK and Australia believe that collaboration and integration are vital components for improving performance. The majority of the contractors in both countries embrace collaborative working for the sole purpose of risk sharing, access to innovation and response to market efficiency. However, most of the models developed for managing the CSC in the UK are built around building information modelling (BIM). Also, the reviewed studies show that supply chain management practice will be effective following the following principle: shared objectives, trust, reduction in a blame culture, joint working, enhanced communication and information-sharing. Finally, the UK has a more established framework and more CSC models compared to Australia.