Co-operative schools: democratic values, networks and leadership

Co-operative neural networks and ‘integrated’ classification

‘Integrated’ classification refers to the conjunctive or competitive use of two or more (neural) classifiers. A cooperative neural network system comprising two independently trained Kohonen networks and co-operating with the help of a Hebbian network, is described. The effectiveness of such a network is demonstrated by using it to retrieve images and related texts from a multi-media database. ...

Democratic Leadership: The Lessons of Exemplary Models for Democratic Governance

Since leadership plays a vital role in democratic movements, understanding the nature of democratic leadership is essential. However, the definition of democratic leadership is unclear (Gastil, 1994). Also, little research has defined democratic leadership in the context of democratic movements. The leadership literature has paid no attention to democratic leadership in such movements, focusing...

The Values of Democratic Proceduralism

A standard justification of democratic voting is that it is a fair procedure, providing for the equal treatment of voters. Democratic theorist David Estlund challenges the adequacy of that justification: flipping a coin between alternatives is also a fair procedure, but no one would propose substituting random draw for voting. Estlund provides several arguments that fair proceduralism is an unt...

Spiritually-Based Leadership in Tehran’s Elementary Schools

To explore the extent to which spiritually-based leadership is implemented in Iranian school management system, a cluster sample of 375 elementary school teachers, along with a group of 10 experts, was selected and given a specially constructed questionnaire with an acceptable validity, as judged by  experts, and an internal consistency of 0.85. Data analyses yielded the following: school princ...

Rethinking middle leadership roles in secondary schools