A study of an empowered school: An investigation of the development and the effect of a teacher empowerment process

The purpose of the study is to describe the evolution of a school's advisory teacher empowerment process, to present an illustrative example of its use, and to investigate the effect of its use to propose school policy designed to solve for interruption to allotted instructional time due to the school's use of the intercom. The study includes an evolutionary model of the process, and presents two illustrative examples: one illustrates the use of the process to identify faculty concerns, and the other illustrates the effect of the process when addressing the problem of interruptions to instructional time due to the school's use of the intercom.Two research designs were used to conduct the study: descriptive and quasi-experimental. For the descriptive components of Research Questions 1, 2, and 3, the researcher reviewed documents of the teacher empowerment organization's first five years and summaries of findings for four preliminary studies during the same period. She conducted interviews with the acting principal, faculty and staff, and used a questionnaire to survey faculty and staff for their opinions regarding the empowerment process of the selected school for the study.For the quasi-experimental component of Research Question 4, the researcher developed instruments under the supervision of a UIUC statistician, collected, and analyzed baseline and treatment data, and, through a t-test of difference, determined the effectiveness of the advisory teacher empowerment process that evolved in the study's school when used to solve for interruption to allotted instructional time due to the school's use of the intercom.The findings of the study were that the empowered school used its empowerment opportunity to organize its faculty and to select empowerment focuses addressing principal selection, school security, identification of faculty concerns, and the school's use of the intercom. A 10-step data-driven advisory teacher empowerment process was established, the Palmer Model of Teacher Empowerment. The model was found to be effective at the.01 level of significance as a result of the t-test for difference when addressing interruption to allotted instructional time due to the school's use of the intercom.U of I OnlyETDs are only available to UIUC Users without author permissio