Training for Quality School-Based Decision Making: the Total Teamwork System.

While this book suggests sample policies for superintendents to adopt in a school system, it is written more for principals implementing school-based decision making. Principals undergo the most dramatic role changes as they must learn to share power and operate in a new, participative structure.

The authors of Training for Quality School-Based Decision Making take the reader through all the necessary steps to reach a quality decision and tie specific skills into each step. They have a wide array of experience as superintendent, educational anthropologist and consultants with businesses and industry.

The book is designed to teach effective decision making to school leadership teams. Educational researcher Thomas Valesky and his co-authors call their approach "The Total Teamwork System."

The book's five chapters are easy to read with flow charts, diagrams and examples as the authors detail problems inside and outside the domain, clarifying questions likely to arise and suggesting ways to garner support for decisions.

(Training for Quality School-Based Decision Making: The Total Teamwork System by Thomas Valesky, Dianne D. Horgan, Carol Etheridge Caughey and Dennie L. Smith, Scarecrow Education, Lanham, Md., 2003, 84 pp., $19.95 softcover)

Paul A. Shaw Superintendent, White County Schools, Cleveland, Ga.