The Road to Open and Healthy Schools : A Handbook for Change, Middle and Secondary School Edition

This is a practitioner's guide for those who want to use an established set of organizational instruments to measure the working atmosphere of their schools. The authors provide six tools to assist the researcher in observing, assessing and improving the school climate at the middle and secondary levels.

Find out what your school′s personality type is--open, closed, or somewhere in between--and help uncover the state of your school′s organizational health. Now you can make sure your middle or secondary school becomes (and stays) a positive and inviting place for both students and staff. Building on nearly 20 years of careful research and real-world testing, Hoy and Tarter offer a set of hands-on tools for observing, assessing, and, if necessary, improving your school′s climate. The authors call their measurement tools the Organizational Climate Description Questionnaire (OCDQ), for tapping the openness of a school′s professional interactions, and the Organizational Health Inventory (OHI), for capturing the health of interpersonal relationships in schools. Learn how to use OCDQ and OHI to view and describe the nature and quality of school interactions among all individuals at your school. Use the openness (OCDQ) and health (OHI) measurements to better understand your school′s professional development needs. You′ll find out how to make minor improvements--or major ones--to benefit everyone at your school. The book provides scoring and interpretation instructions and gives you concrete examples of how to apply the results of your analysis to achieve lasting, positive change.