Innovative School

Schools are described as social systems whose primary organizational features are closely interrelated. Methods for coordinating these features are presented so schools can restructure their bureaucratic orientation. The interrelated nature of a school's various subsystems is highlighted to point out how they can be coordinated so genuine restructuring can be achieved and maintained.

Each model of organization in a school—bureaucratic, systems, and communal—displays its own distinguishing characteristics, and each one governs different aspects of people's behavior in schools. The decisive questions are: which behavioral patterns of the people in the school will be governed by each model, and what will be the relative extent to which each model influences the nature of the relationships and educational processes in the school?

Restructured schools emphasize the systems and communal models in their organizational and instructional norms, with bureaucratic norms mainly governing routine administrative procedures, while in traditional schools the bureaucratic model yields decisive influence on curricular structure, classroom teaching models, and staff relations, as well as on administrative features of the school. This book spells out a systems and communal approach to organization, curriculum, and instruction. It describes how to adopt an investigative approach to learning, often with cooperative groups of students, coupled with a trans-disciplinary approach to curricular structure and with a restructured schedule of classes to allow for in-depth study of broad intellectual domains.

SHLOMO SHARAN is Professor of Educational Psychology, Tel-Aviv University-Israel, where he has been involved in school improvement by applying systems theory and small group dynamics to staff organization and classroom instruction. He has been a visiting professor and/or research fellow at Stanford, Yale, Johns Hopkins, and Helsinki (Finland) University. He has authored and edited numerous research studies and books, including Expanding Cooperative Learning through Group Investigation (1992) and Handbook of Cooperative Learning Methods (Greenwood 1994).

HANNA SHACHAR is Senior Lecturer in the School of Education at Bar-Ilan University, Ramat Gan, Israel. For many years she chaired the division of consultation to secondary schools in the Institute for the Promotion of Social Integration in the Schools, also at Bar-Ilan University, where she directed city-wide intervention projects to introduce participative management in school organization and cooperative learning in classroom instruction. She is co-author, with Shlomo Sharan, of Organization and Team Management in Schools (1990) and Language and Learning in the Cooperative Classroom (1988).

TAMAR LEVINE is Associate Professor of Education and Chair, Department of Curriculum and Instruction in the School of Education, Tel-Aviv University. She teaches graduate courses on interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary curriculum development and evaluation. Her major fields of interest and research include the design of effective and constructivist-based instructional strategies, students' and teachers' thinking, the uses of computers to enhance school learning, and gender differences in science and mathematics.