Valley View Middle School Case Study

The guided research questions helped provide reflections to aid in discussions on the Valley View Middle School case study. Several of the guided research questions pertained to whether the leadership behavior that Superintendent O’Brien, Frank Becker, and Earl Radburn demonstrated was consistent with the three tenets of transformational leadership and what motives prevented them from exhibiting better examples of transformational leadership. Other questions referred to how these individuals could have used their influence to better motivate, collaborate, and ethically inspire teachers and parents at the middle school. Additional guided questions asked how O’Brien and Radburn could have used the uniform policy to better promote a sense of unity at the middle school, how they could have better dealt with the parents who opposed the uniform policy, and how their behavior was both culturally competent and incompetent. Questions also centered on how reversing the uniform policy contradicted principles of cultural competency and social justice. Similarly,
Despite this, the case study is significant because it provides additional research on how the departmentalized instruction method may be useful in some elementary schools. The various approaches used to gather data increased the overall validity and reliability of the study. The findings were consistent with the related literature and indicated that implementing the departmentalized instruction in pilot trials could help increase achievement in elementary schools, reduce teacher stress, and improve job satisfaction, teacher self-efficacy, planning time, collaboration, and interaction with parents and students. In the future, case studies can also gather perspectives about the use of departmentalized instruction from students and