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Cohorts are increasingly popular management tools for recruiting students into professional education programs, for organizing their learning experiences, for promoting performance-based outcomes, and for developing and using innovative teaching-learning practices. This article examines issues about the effects of learning in cohorts by focusing on existing research and posing rhetorical questions about what happens both inside and outside cohorts. The purpose of the article is to stimulate dialogue about the impact of cohort participation on learning outcomes, professorial roles, and professional practice. The authors pose a series of unanswered questions about learning in cohorts as a beginning strategy for developing a nationwide longitudinal study to explore transference of learning in cohorts by aspiring school administrators to their professional practice.

An introduction is presented in which the editors discuss various reports within the issue on topics including the educational system in Sweden, the function of school superintendents, and the school governance in Denmark.

The article discusses various reports published within the issue including one about local school governance in Sweden, one on parental involvement in Norwegian schools, and a discussion on school-parent relations in Finland.

Educational reform initiated by policymakers to improve public schools often fails to achieve desired results for diverse reasons. This article describes how Kentucky aligned externally mandated school reform with internally determined school renewal through implementation of its Standards and Indicators for School Improvement. Results of biennial studies by the state department of education using the model indicate eleven common variance points between successful and underperforming schools. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents district administrators' reflections about (a) the contextual challenges they face in leading a high-need rural school system in Central Appalachia and (b) the change initiatives they implemented to transform the principalship from school management to instructional leadership. After several years of reform efforts, the district superintendent sought external support to deliver intensive professional development to further the district's efforts. A land-grant research university and the rural district partnered to develop the Principals Excellence Program (PEP) and, in turn, submitted a proposal for funding to support training for two cohorts of practicing principals and administrator-certified teachers who aspire to become principals. The article presents perspectives by the district administrators and leadership educators involved in the district-initiated activities to change the culture of administrative practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]