We examined how end-of-first-year students in a Carnegie Project on the Education Doctorate (CPED)-affiliated EdD program were developing professional identities as educational leaders and researchers. Quantitative and qualitative data revealed substantial development of leadership skills, but even greater growth in perceptions of research skills. Qualitative data indicated students "tried out" leadership and research skills in their workplaces. These provisional efforts were consistent with the notion of possible selves or provisional selves in which individuals try on identities. Implications for program leaders and students are also discussed. In addition, we reported on a-study-within-a-study: We examined our efforts in learning/teaching research skills as the study was conducted.
The purpose of this article is to share the insights gleaned from the literature and our on-the-ground realities teaching practitioners to conduct educational research and evaluation. We focus on four areas we have found most important for teaching practitioner-scholars: (a) giving careful attention to andragogy versus pedagogy, (b) engaging the potency that team teaching affords, (c) addressing challenges associated with the practitioner-scholar model, and (d) building on the strengths of the cohort model. We share the challenges and possibilities of each strategy and close by offering recommendations for the educational leadership field in moving forward.
In this conceptual article, we draw upon recent literature to describe the theoretical, epistemological, and methodological anchors that can inform a working conception of practitioner-scholarship. We position practitioner-scholarship at the intersection of an individual’s work as a practitioner and researcher, wherein a practitioner focuses on understanding localized problems of practice through in-depth inquiry. Through our discussion, we highlight three implications for leadership programs. First, practitioner-scholarship demands that all program faculty take a learning orientation. Second, research experiences provided to students should be immersed in leadership practice and directly situated within schools and districts. Third, we advocate increased consistency, rigor, and theoretical depth in methods training for educational leadership students.
We present our approach to a qualitative research methods course to prepare practitioner-scholars for their dissertation and independent research. We explain how an instructor’s guide provides consistency and rigor, and in-class activities to scaffold learning, and helps faculty connect the content to students’ out-of-school lives. We explain how reflection is used to develop students’ reflective practice and enable us to improve the course in both the short and long term. We argue the necessity of having tools that ensure our teaching philosophy translates into a consistent curriculum and instructional approach, maximizing the chances that faculty facilitate our students’ development into practitioner-scholars.
This article analyzes a novel effort to strengthen the preparation of both practitioner-scholars and education researchers. It describes a university–district partnership that offers graduate students the opportunity to develop research understandings and skills through participation in a "real" research project and provides district leaders the formative evaluation information they need to guide decision making on major reform initiatives. The article suggests that partnerships that link school district research priorities with university-based, policy evaluation research courses can enrich the university’s approach to the teaching of research methods and can yield rigorous studies that both serve local districts and speak to broader academic and professional audiences.
This pedagogy–practice article portrays three instructional activities that were implemented with aspiring leaders and refined over four rounds of teaching the course in a northeastern state’s principal preparation program (PPP). After describing each activity, I share lessons learned regarding the pedagogy of principal preparation. I make the case that embedding organizational theory into PPP coursework can play a role in developing the higher order skills of aspiring leaders.
Since 1997, the Great Lakes Academy has provided leadership development for more than 800 teachers in a large metropolitan region of the Upper Midwest. Graduates of the 2-year program often describe their experience as transformative, life changing, and profound. To understand the meaning and impact of this transformation, the author used Mezirow’s theory of transformative learning as a lens for analyzing the written reflections of recent graduates and interviews with teachers who completed the program 2 years earlier. Study findings highlight the importance of identity transformation as a critical step in the preparation of teacher leaders.
This case study describes how all leaders in one elementary school focused their collective work implementing a dramatically changed, state-mandated teacher-evaluation system. The article describes how multiple leaders created new professional development structures based on staff feedback and adapted exiting professional development structures to focus on student achievement. Findings indicate that strongly held collective leadership beliefs and values are interwoven with professional development structures in an intertwined lattice of leadership.
The quantitative research methods course is a staple of graduate programs in education leadership and administration. Historically, these courses serve to train aspiring district and school leaders in fundamental statistical research topics. This article argues for programs to focus as well in these courses on helping aspiring leaders develop skills as practitioner-scholars, including deepening their practice around data analytics, providing opportunities to read and evaluate peer-reviewed research, analyzing data using current methods, and applying findings to facilitate building evidence-based improvement cycles in their schools. Additional data leadership training should be offered for the practicing administrator, educational quantitative analyst, research specialist, and district data scientist.
In this article, we report findings from an exploratory, qualitative study in which we used a constructivist lens to examine how two high school principals endeavored to develop the personal capacities of teachers and other leaders in their schools. We collected data from semistructured interviews with the principals and three other leaders from each of their respective schools. Through our findings, we illustrate the varying degree to which each principal viewed the leaders’ existing capacities, structured their leadership learning opportunities, guided their reflections, and assessed their learning in the context of leadership practice. An important finding was that the way the principals viewed leadership development and saw other leaders as learners themselves appeared to influence the way they developed other leaders’ personal capacities.
This article addresses a gap in methodological writing, concerning typical practice in designing qualitative inquiry, especially in research on educational leadership. The article focuses on how qualitative research designs are actually developed and explores implications for scholars’ work, especially for new scholars and for methods teachers. Working from methodological literature across multiple traditions, combined with the author’s experience designing qualitative studies and guiding emerging scholars and practitioner-scholars, the article describes alternative ways to develop viable designs, noting essential considerations and trade-offs along the way. While noting differences by tradition, the article emphasizes common patterns and implications shared by multiple traditions.
We present a framework for considering principals’ knowledge and actions to support high-quality instruction in a specific content area (mathematics). Using design research, we engaged principals in professional development and assessed principals’ ability to identify aspects of high-quality mathematical tasks and instruction through pre–post task sort analyses and classroom video analyses. Significant differences occurred in principals’ identification of high-quality mathematics tasks and instruction, students’ thinking, and teachers’ actions. Subsequent data identified changes in principals’ feedback to mathematics teachers; however, this change was not sustained in following years. We hypothesize necessary conditions for supporting principals as instructional leaders in specific content areas.
This study investigated the credentials of 755 tenure-line educational leadership faculty members, using data collected through an online questionnaire. Findings disclosed that research institutions were significantly more likely than doctoral or comprehensive institutions to hire faculty with a PhD from a research university and who identified research as their primary professional strength. A greater proportion of faculty in comprehensive universities had served as school administrators before entering academe than was the case for those at research universities. These findings have significant implications for the field, given that an increasing number of school leaders nationally are prepared at comprehensive institutions.
Despite attention given to principal preparation program reform, little research exists explaining how candidates develop self-efficacy or how preparation programs contribute to self-efficacy development. Researchers used a mixed-methods study to examine principals’ perceptions of program effectiveness, determine underlying constructs related to self-efficacy, explore how those factors functioned, and suggest ways to design program experiences promoting self-efficacy. Results suggest that program experiences should create opportunities for relationship building, authentic leadership experiences working with others, and persevering to build self-efficacy. Faculty can support efficacy development through creating instructional opportunities where students gain mastery of leading others in school improvement strategies, requiring internships of substantial length for relationship development, and designing rigorous coursework and program challenges with supportive structures to teach perseverance.
Drawing on the notions of biculturalism, or double consciousness, and hybridity, this qualitative study explored how 12 pre-tenure faculty of color (FOC) in the field of educational leadership working at universities in the United States negotiated their self-identified cultural identities within their predominantly White departments. Results indicated that participants were more bicultural in nature than they were in self-authoring a new hybrid identity. Nonetheless, bicultural skills equipped FOC with a better sense of how to help their departments critically examine and move beyond White-dominant notions of educational leadership preparation to more culturally responsive approaches.
Florida’s Race to the Top (RTTT) competition invited university–district partnerships to compete for funds aimed at improving principal preparation programs. In this article, we report findings from a qualitative case study focused on one program partnership funded by RTTT. Drawing upon interviews with faculty and relevant documents, we conducted a thematic analysis to determine how faculty perceived RTTT, the state, and the district influenced the development of the program. Three themes were identified and suggest that faculty perceived the influence of RTTT was filtered by the state’s existing reform priorities. Implications for preparation and directions for future research are provided.
Recent calls to hold preparation programs accountable for outcomes have led states to develop and adopt preparation program accountability systems. A primary feature of these systems is a focus on outcomes such as placement rates, retention rates, and graduates’ effectiveness in improving K-12 student achievement. Yet, little research has examined the feasibility of employing such outcome measures, let alone the validity and reliability of the inherent judgments. This conceptual study reviews and makes conclusions about the appropriateness of using placement rates to evaluate principal-preparation programs based on theoretical analyses and empirical analysis of statewide placement data from Texas.
Teaching organizational theory in a way that bridges to leadership practice is vital to preparing deft educational leaders who understand the organizational behavior of schools and districts. Organizational theory guides understanding of the complexities of schools and districts and can be a basis for collaborative and effective decision making. This article suggests specific theory that could be taught, strategies for teaching it that are illuminated by examples of student work, and benefits that are likely to accrue.
Given the complexity of contemporary leadership, scholars and practitioners seek to improve preparation programs so that school leaders can more effectively support adult development. This article describes longitudinal research investigating how a university course on leadership for adult development (Leadership for Transformational Learning [LTL]) influenced graduates’ conceptions of leadership immediately after the course and years later. This article describes (a) course goals, structures, and curricula; (b) changes in thinking that leaders attributed to LTL; and (c) course ideas and practices that leaders named as essential to their current thinking and work. This investigation offers insight into how university courses can support leaders’ internal growth.
Scholars are increasingly considering how theoretical concepts about social justice might permeate leadership preparation programs’ design. Yet the degree to which these concepts actually anchor these programs is unclear. This article addresses this gap by analyzing how the University of California’s Principal Leadership Institute bridges theory and practice according to a social justice framework. It applies a theoretical framework for guiding social justice leadership preparation to guide a content analysis of program syllabi. It identifies specific features of the program’s curriculum, pedagogy, and assessment that reflect or contradict this framework, and then discusses the implications for research and practice.
This article examines two questions: (a) In what ways can doctoral-level learning experiences help executive-level P-12 leaders to develop instructional leadership expertise and commitment to high levels of learning among diverse student groups? (b) How can educators be supported in this learning within the context of an Education Doctorate (EdD)? To explore these questions, we first draw on the literature concerning adult professional learning, instructional leadership, and the doctoral education of educators aiming for administrative roles and practice, to create a framework for examining university-based efforts to guide aspiring leaders’ learning in these realms. Then, focusing on the "instructional leadership" strand of an EdD program in which we are instructors, we examine how an appropriate learning environment can be constructed, and then illustrate the nature and evidence of learning with mini-cases of three different kinds of students who participated in the program.
Teacher leadership is increasingly recognized as a resource for instructional improvement. Consequently, teacher leader initiatives have expanded rapidly despite limited knowledge about how to prepare and support teacher leaders. In this context, the Teacher Leader Model Standards represent an important development in the field. In this article, we use findings from the content analyses of four preexisting teacher leader preparation programs to identify strengths and gaps in these new standards. Our aim is to invite critical dialogue about the standards to improve their utility for strengthening teacher leadership preparation, policy, and practice.
Preparing school administrators to support effective instruction of English language learners (ELLs) is an important dimension of today’s school leadership programs, yet often difficult to enact. This paper reports a comprehensive needs analysis of a school leadership advanced certificate program carried out by Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL) and school administration faculty. This contributed to a comprehensive understanding of the needs of faculty and candidates in their beliefs and experiences with ELL pedagogy. Implications for collaboration with TESOL faculty to strengthen more effective instruction for ELLs are discussed.
This exploratory study gathered information about the use of action research within doctor of education programs in educational leadership and explored faculty understanding of and perspectives on action research. Survey data established that action research is used infrequently to meet dissertation requirements. Contributing factors include lack of clarity regarding the nature of action research (AR) and concerns about methodological legitimacy. Because the development of collaborative leadership skills and the pursuit of social justice objectives are inherent to the action research process, these results call for additional discussion regarding this distinctive methodology and its role in the preparation of educational leaders at the doctoral level.
We interviewed eight principals from Bermuda and Florida about how they identify and manage their most pressing challenges. Their challenges are composed of both adaptive and technical work, requiring leaders to learn to diagnose and manage them. Challenges focused on change and were traced to accountability contexts, yet accountability was not the driving force for all principals. Neither external demands nor principals themselves dictated whether the problem was technical or adaptive; instead, it was the nature of the problem itself. Leadership preparation programs are encouraged to provide a framework to address managing phases of adaptive, technical, and mixed challenges.
Much of the literature criticizing university-based school leadership preparation programs concludes that programs are, at best, reluctant to change, a conclusion often based more on anecdotal stories than a more systematic inquiry. This article provides evidence on the extent of change in programs since passage of the Standards for Advanced Programs in Educational Leadership in 2002. Chairs at National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education–accredited schools were surveyed to determine the nature and extent of adoption of design elements associated with effective programs. Descriptive and inferential statistics were used to demonstrate that there has been wide-ranging change in university programs, and that the extent of this change does not depend on type of university or membership in University Council for Educational Administration.
The authors describe a process of self-assessment attuned to equity and justice in the policies and practices that affect student diversity, namely, those associated with the selection of candidates. The disproportionate rate of rejection for applicants from underrepresented groups and the unsystematic process of applicant selection operated as hidden curriculum affecting the opportunities for the program to enhance meaningful relationships among diverse groups of students. The authors describe institutional and sociopolitical conditions, and individual actions reflecting a faculty’s will to policy. Faculty efforts supported and challenged systemic change to increase racial and ethnic diversity among aspiring educational administrators.