ABSTRACT

Clear goals are necessary and useful; but what happens along the way is what really matters.

Philo Santini

Restructuring efforts, all the rage currently, inevitably claim to be based on research findings. Why shouldn't they? The body of educational research has grown exponentially in quantity and quality in the past 20 years. O utstand ing educational researchers such as Lee Schulman, Robert Slavin, Jerome Bruner, David Pearson, John Goodlad, Jere Brophy, Paula Short, Thomas Good, Nell Noddings, Benjamin Bloom, Herbert Walberg, David and Roger Johnson, and other notables, make up a veritable hall of fame in our field. Their insights to teaching and learning furnish administrators and teachers with an increasingly clear sense of the possibilities for improvement. One could argue that what we do is beginning to catch up with the two other cooperative arts, medicine and agriculture, in that at long last we have a guiding body of evidence to inform practice. Still, it isn't easy.