The School Leader's Guide to Understanding Attitude and Influencing Behavior: Working With Teachers, Parents, Students, and the Community

"Educational administrators will find the book to be an easily applicable tool for solving many of the dilemmas they face in their schools."
Theron Schutte, Middle School Principal
Boone Community School District, IA

"The book provides a theoretical base for practical application of strategies that will strengthen beliefs and attitudes that support behaviors that can move a school toward the fulfillment of its educational mission."
David Erlandson, Professor
Texas A&M University

"This book keeps its promises: it is truly a guide for action that will be used by educators, especially educational change agents. Each of the authors comes out of an unusual blend of theoretical sophistication and practical experience that make this book a stimulating intellectual read and a solid manual for practice."
Steven Tozer, Professor of Education
University of Illinois

Why do people behave as they do? What makes them take a stand on a specific issue?

Solving school problems and making policy decisions require that we anticipate how people will feel about an issue or how they will behave. School leaders must understand the values, attitudes, and beliefs brought to different situations. The School Leader′s Guide to Understanding Attitude and Influencing Behavior makes it possible for educators to scientifically understand and influence the attitudes and behaviors of diverse constituencies, both inside and outside the school.
Using the Model of Reasoned Action (MORA) enables readers to understand how people form attitudes and make decisions about a wide variety of future behaviors. Armed with this information, educators can change attitudes and influence behavior of teachers, staff, parents, and the community. This excellent resource includes:

• Examples of attitude scales
• A sample questionnaire
• A checklist of steps through an attitude-behavior study
• Tables to organize and report data
• Data analysis presented in an easily-applied manner

When you must know how best to influence the attitudes or behaviors of others, this remarkable book will show you. Make a positive difference in your school or district!

Brandt W. Pryor is Director of The Evaluation Group, College of Education, at Texas A&M University, College Station, where he now leads statewide studies of high school reform efforts. He is also an educational research consultant specializing in attitude and behavior studies. He has previously served as Associate Professor, Department of   Educational Leadership, Lamar University, and Senior Research Associate in the College of Education at Arizona State University. He did his doctoral work at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, where he studied attitude theory and measurement with Martin Fishbein, the world’s leading social psychologist. (Dr. Fishbein is now the Harry C. Coles, Jr., Distinguished Professor at the University of Pennsylvania.) His dissertation research, on which committee Fishbein served, was the first successful application of Fishbein’s model to decision making about participation in voluntary educational programs. He later replicated that study in investigations of decision making by schoolteachers, prin-cipals, and others. His most recently completed attitude study investigated the participation of information scientists in professional development, and was published in the Journal of Education in Library and Information Science, 39, 118–133. He is currently studying decisions of teachers and administrators to use interactive video conferencing for pro-fessional development, and decisions of teachers to integrate technology into their instruction. He has spoken on attitudes and behavior since 1984, with high school students, community college teachers, as well as with public school and university teachers, researchers, and administrators. He has presented numerous scholarly papers concerning attitude theory, and has conducted his work-shop Have You Got “Attitude”?: Measuring, Understanding, and Changing Attitude and Behavior at state and national meetings since 1998.

Caroline R. Pryor is Assistant Professor and Regents Fellow in the Department of Teaching, Learning and Culture, at Texas A&M University, College Station. In 2003 she was selected as a Wye Fellow of The Aspen Institute .  She holds a doctorate in Secondary   Education from Arizona State University. Her postdoctoral work at Arizona State University concerned the development of a citywide field-based preservice teacher education program, including staff development for princi-pals and mentor teachers. She holds teaching credentials in grades K–9, is a former elementary school teacher, and was the director of an English as a Second Language program. Her books include Philosophy of Education Workbook: Writing a Statement of Beliefs and Practices (2002), Democratic Practice Workbook: Activities for the Field Experience (2000), and Writing a Philosophy Statement: An Educator’s Workbook (2004), all published by McGraw-Hill; as well as The Mission of the Scholar: Research and Perspectives, published by Peter Lang (2002).  Currently, her research focuses on democratic classroom discourse strategies, and applying the model to study preser-vice and mentor teachers’ intentions to implement democratic practice. She has also applied aspects of the model in grant project evaluations (e.g., Pryor & Kang, 2003). She teaches graduate courses in curriculum theory and development. In a career that spans 25 years of teaching, she has worked extensively with principals and teachers in field-based, preservice programs building alliances for school reform.