The Talking Point is all about how people learn within groups. People can be much smarter than crowds if you measure "smart" as decision-making speed. Crowds can be much wiser than individuals if you measure wisdom by depth of understanding. It is possible to understand a great deal of information yet (or maybe because of this) you can also be slow to make decisions. If rushed, crowds will make poor decisions in spite of their wisdom. So... to get good group decisions on a time scale that will keep pace with policy development needs and social necessities, groups have to be supported so that their decision-making process can be accelerated. Much has been said and written about this problem over the years. It is dangerous to have the power of groups without the wisdom of groups, and it is tragic to have the wisdom of groups without the power of groups. The Talking Point presents a meeting point for the wisdom and power of groups through the use of Structured Dialogic Design. With hopeful intentions, as a culture we have poisoned the well just when we need it most. We have touted design charettes and stakeholder processes as engagement vehicles and then ignored, marginalized or corrupted the very input that we swore to hold as sacred. This has created a myth that large scale collaboration is not possible, and the myth has led to considerable disillusionment among would-be participants and could-be sponsors. Structured Dialogic Design seeks to bust the myth about our limited capabilities to sustain boundary spanning collaboration. To bust this myth, Structured Dialogic Design needs to usher in a new wave of collaborative planning. Scholars have identified the Structured Dialogic Design methodology as the cutting edge of "third phase" science - where the reality of a situation embraces interactions between objective findings and subjective intentions. The Talking Point provides a window for observing how Structured Dialogic Design has been put into practice and paints a panorama of the issues that confront complex social system design. This book is itself a bridge between scholarship and practice, written to be accessible yet anchored to major themes in cognitive psychology, information systems, social systems, and models of group learning. The book is an invitation for transformational leaders and those who support transformational leaders to pick up a new tool in the essential quest to put our nation and our world back on track toward sustainable futures. The Talking Point is a fresh source of water in a world that is thirsty for new ways of solving complex problems.

To commemorate the 10-year anniversary of the International School Leadership Development Network (ISLDN), this book is a compilation of the work conducted by network scholars. This volume is the first comprehensive overview of the studies conducted by ISLDN members engaged in examining how social justice leaders and leaders of high-needs schools address the social conditions, learning experiences, and performance of their students. Other international school leadership research consortia have emerged in the 21st century; however, the ISLDN is the second longest operating project, after the International Successful School Principalship Project (ISSPP). Since its creation in 2010, ISLDN scholars have delivered papers at a variety of international conferences and shared findings in research publications, including books and special issues of journals. Until now, ISLDN research findings have been disseminated separately for the project's two strands: (a) social justice leadership and (b) leadership in underperforming high-needs schools. Therefore, the purpose of the book is to document the history and evolution of the ISLDN and to provide descriptions and reflections of the project's research findings, methodologies, and collaborative processes across the two strands. This volume captures studies of school leaders from 19 countries representing six continents - Africa, Asia, Australia and Oceania, Europe, North America, and South America. The authors examine important external and internal contextual factors influencing schools in different cultural settings and provide insights about the values and practices of social justice leaders working in high-needs school settings. Numerous practical strategies are provided for school leaders working in schools with similar conditions. The concluding chapter by the co-editors synthesizes the structural factors, personal beliefs and values, and contextualized change management strategies that shape school leaders' actions aimed at ensuring the best learning outcomes for their students. Besides capturing the range of findings emerging from various ISLDN studies conducted over the past decade, several chapters critically examine the project's current contributions to the field. Authors suggest broadening the dissemination of our findings to increase the visibility of the project, expanding the research methods beyond qualitative interviews, incorporating studies from non-Anglophone countries, and augmenting the scope of our analyses and research focus. These researchers' journeys also reveal the obstacles to and benefits of engaging in these types of international collaborative research ventures.

Sustainability issues have gained more importance in contemporary globalization, pushing decision makers to find a systematic mathematical approach to conduct analyses of this real-world problem. The growing complexity in modern social-economics or engineering environments or systems has forced researchers to solve complicated problems by using multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) approaches. However, traditional MCDM research mainly focuses on reaching the highest economic value or efficiency, and issues related to sustainability are still not closely explored. Advanced Multi-Criteria Decision Making for Addressing Complex Sustainability Issues discusses and addresses the challenges in the implementation of decision-making models in the context of green and sustainable engineering, criteria identification, quantification, comparison, selection, and analysis in the context of manufacturing, supply chain, transportation, and energy sectors. All academic communities in the areas of management, economics, business sciences, mechanical, and manufacturing technologies are able to use, apply, and implement the models presented in this book. It is intended for researchers, manufacturers, engineers, managers, industry professionals, academicians, and students.

This book is a methodological guide intended for those who wish to better understand how to conduct research in the education and training sciences. It is organized into three main parts. The first part deals with postures, emphasizing the idea that engaging in a research process involves taking a different stance from that of a social or professional actor. For example, this may require converting a professional or social question into a research question or reflecting on the use of a social vocabulary in research. The second part concerns practices, that is, how research is conducted: the definition of a research question based on findings, theoretical exploration and problematization, the production of empirical information and its analysis and restitution. The third and final part concludes by focusing on the diversity of research forms; not only research cultures specific to disciplinary fields and approaches, such as action research, collaborative research or research training, but also the design choices in terms of multi-, inter- or trans-disciplinarily.