Preparing First-Time Leaders for an Urban Public School District: An Action Research Study of a Collaborative District-University Partnership

This article reports the results for the first cycle of an action research study about a district-university partnership. Two district facilitators and two university facilitators co-constructed a principal preparation program for an innercity school district to help prepare the next generation of building leaders. Twenty-two students participated in the 15-month nontraditional program. The study found that in preparing first-time school leaders, the most helpful experiences were those that developed self-understanding and readiness for the role change. New instructional techniques and the full-time residency facilitated this learning. It also found that the partnership, though providing new and exciting opportunities to deviate from the traditional preparation model, needed further development

Transition in the waiting-time distribution of price-change events in a global socioeconomic system

The goal of developing a firmer theoretical understanding of inhomogeneous temporal processes–in particular, the waiting times in some collective dynamical system–is attracting significant interest among physicists. Quantifying the deviations between the waiting-time distribution and the distribution generated by a random process may help unravel the feedback mechanisms that drive the underlying dynamics. We analyze the waiting-time distributions of high-frequency foreign exchange data for the best executable bid–ask prices across all major currencies. We find that the lognormal distribution yields a good overall fit for the waiting-time distribution between currency rate changes if both short and long waiting times are included. If we restrict our study to long waiting times, each currency pair’s distribution is consistent with a power-law tail with exponent near to 3.5. However, for short waiting times, the overall distribution resembles one generated by an archetypal complex systems model in which boundedly rational agents compete for limited resources. Our findings suggest that a gradual transition arises in trading behavior between a fast regime in which traders act in a boundedly rational way and a slower one in which traders’ decisions are driven by generic feedback mechanisms across multiple timescales and hence produce similar power-law tails irrespective of currency type. •We quantify the distribution of waiting times between currency price changes.•A gradual transition is observed between short and long waiting times.•Longer waiting times show a power-law tail with exponent near 3.5.•Shorter waiting times can be explained using a model of boundedly rational agents