Promoting Organizational and Cultural Change in New Brunswick Schools
Bibliographic record
Abstract
School systems around the world are faced with high expectations for student achievement to meet the learning needs of the 21st century. To meet these expectations, the concept of professional learning communities (PLCs) is gaining widespread acceptance among educators and policy makers. Accordingly, the New Brunswick Department of Education’s (2007) document When Kids Come First included the goal: “Ensure the professional learning communities concept is expanded throughout the K-12 system ” (p. 14). Core elements of PLCs include common vision and values, shared decision-making, collaborative practice, collective responsibility, and a focus on learning. However, implementation of these elements of PLCs requires a significant commitment to organizational and cultural change within school systems. Such change in education often faces challenges and obstacles. In 2006, we received research funding to conduct a provincial study entitled Institutional Barriers to Tri-Level Educational Reform. The purpose of our study was to examine barriers to the implementation of PLCs at three levels of the school system (school, district, and province) and to create assessment tools that could be used by schools, school districts, and provincial departments of education to identify the extent to which they were operating according to PLC principles. For educators at each level of the school system, our goal was to create a questionnaire that they could complete to help them assess their own organizational policies, practices, structures, and culture according to the key characteristics of PLCs. We made a deliberate choice to work at three levels of the school system because research indicates that sustainable, large-scale reform in education requires commitment, support, and modelling at all levels of the school system. This view runs counter to the experience and practice in many school jurisdictions of major educational reform being imposed from government or educational leaders upon schools, teachers, and students, often referred to as top-down reform. Because of the complexity of schools and school systems, such reform
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.007 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.026 | 0.012 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.012 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.012 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".