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

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.