The kinds of knowledge principals use: Implications for training

Information about how school principals operate pertains mainly to the actions of principals. However, the kinds of knowledge that the principalship demands have not been isolated as clearly, more often than not being conflated with actions. As principals’ duties become more complex, it becomes more important to ground specific practices in robust knowledge of relevant theoretical principles. One aspect of the principal’s job where this is particularly germane is the resolution of unfamiliar, complex, unstructured challenges. This paper presents findings from research into how principals think when dealing with problematic situations, in particular the types of knowledge they use. Four broad categories of knowledge were identified and, within those, twelve specific types. The research lends credence to the oral report or think-aloud method for making thinking processes available for analysis, and the findings indicate how the content of preparation programs may be adjusted to better qualify principals for the contemporary demands of their work. A prime recommendation is the inclusion of opportunities for the development of tacit knowledge

Combining Language and Vision with a Multimodal Skip-gram Model

We extend the SKIP-GRAM model of Mikolov et al. (2013a) by taking visual information into account. Like SKIP-GRAM, our multimodal models (MMSKIP-GRAM) build vector-based word representations by learning to predict linguistic contexts in text corpora. However, for a restricted set of words, the models are also exposed to visual representations of the objects they denote (extracted from natural images), and must predict linguistic and visual features jointly. The MMSKIP-GRAM models achieve good performance on a variety of semantic benchmarks. Moreover, since they propagate visual information to all words, we use them to improve image labeling and retrieval in the zero-shot setup, where the test concepts are never seen during model training. Finally, the MMSKIP-GRAM models discover intriguing visual properties of abstract words, paving the way to realistic implementations of embodied theories of meaning.Comment: accepted at NAACL 2015, camera ready version, 11 page

An Additional Way of Thinking About Organizational Life and Leadership: The Quantum Perspective

In this paper our first purpose is to outline a way of thinking about organizations and administration that has recently been gaining ground among theoreticians and practitioners, one that is portrayed frequently as a replacement for the well established newtonian or systems perspective. This way of thinking is the quantum perspective. Our second purpose is to illustrate how the metaphors of this emergent perspective can add to understandings about leadership, in particular when fostering commitment and dealing with conflict. To these ends, we first describe selected differences between the entrenched perspective on organizations and administration – the newtonian perspective – and the new quantum perspective. In this section we give particular attention to the quantum notion of a pervasive energy field that drives change as well as recent discoveries about the ways humans think. Next we contrast the values ascribed to an individual’s public and private selves in newtonian and quantum organizations. Finally we consider how the newtonian and the quantum orientations in leadership are likely to affect the commitment of an organization’s members. And we relate this to findings from research on the management of conflict.