Redesigning leadership programs: 4 puzzles.

Abstract

Despite increasing criticism, many educational leadership programs have been actively engaged in restructuring to meet school systems' needs for well-prepared leaders. This paper examines three such efforts focused in one university program. Four key "puzzles" involved in redesign are discussed. Findings show that a key to improving leadership preparation is to accommodate flexibly to the needs of prospective leaders and the districts they aspire to serve.

Introduction

In the past year, the ongoing attack on educational leadership preparation programs has reached a level of rhetoric reminiscent of A Nation at Risk. Levine's (2005) report, Educating School Leaders, while not the only specimen of its kind, is particularly memorable in this regard. Levine asserts that educational leadership programs are engaged in a "race to the bottom," suffer from curricular disarray, have low admissions and graduation standards, offer inadequate clinical experiences, and are staffed by weak faculties. He concludes that few strong programs exist, and that many should be closed. While criticisms of leadership programs have gotten considerable attention, the work of addressing many of the issues critics like Levine highlight has been going on for some time. Orr (2006) describes the considerable progress many programs have made in revamping themselves, which, she says, provides "compelling evidence that significant innovation exists in the field and positively influences graduates' leadership practice" (p. 493).

In this paper, we concentrate on the challenges of redesigning educational leadership programs to ensure their meaningful contribution to the development of well prepared leaders for today's schools. We focus on a select number of puzzles faced by each of the planning teams engaged in designing-three pilot partnership projects and how they are responding to the needs of their various constituencies.

Background

Renewed attention to the role of leaders in promoting school improvement (Leithwood & Riehl, 2003; Waters, Marzano & McNulty, 2003), and the role of school leaders in meeting the needs of "especially challenging schools" (Leithwood & Steinbach, 2004), predates the current round of criticism of educational leadership programs. The impetus to reform leadership education stems from increased pressure on schools from high-stakes accountability policies, and the realization that demands on the principalship have shifted from mostly managerial responsibilities to instructional leadership (Kochan, Jackson, & Duke, 1999). Requirements that principals promote student achievement, facilitate the use of research to inform decision-making, and enlist stakeholders in reform (Fullan, 2001; Leithwood & Riehl, 2003) cause school districts to have greater difficulty finding highly qualified candidates (Gates, Ringel, Santibanez, Ross & Chung, 2003).

Preparing leadership candidates for a dramatically changed context and roles is a substantial challenge. The primary criticisms of university-based programs leveled recently may be viewed as a failure to respond quickly enough, rather than as a failure to respond at all (Hale & Moorman, 2003; Peterson, 2002). To help accelerate the alignment between what colleges of education offer and what the job market demands, leadership programs have been called on to enter into more significant partnerships with school systems to ensure that an adequate number of high-quality administrators are available to lead schools (Fry, Bottoms, O'Neil, & Jacobson, 2004).

In the summer of 2005, we entered into three such partnerships--two funded by the Virginia Department of Education and one funded by a leadership development grant previously received by the participating school district. The State Department of Education grants are designed to encourage experimentation and the creation of innovative principal preparation programs while removing the necessity of following the state-approved certification curriculum. The school district operating under its own grant was given similar clearance to experiment with an alternative curriculum. Faculty-led planning teams that include school district personnel were formed for each project.

Method

An action research design was employed to gather data about the work of the planning teams. Faculty coordinators of each team served as primary collectors of data. Members of each planning team served as informants. Meeting records, memoranda, and field notes augment data collected periodically through semi-structured interviews with planning team members and district administrators.

One of the distinctive features of this project is the diverse character of the school systems involved: the first is one of the fifteen largest school systems in the country, has a stable population, and is regarded as highly innovative. The second is among the fastest-growing suburban school systems in the country. The third involves a consortium of three smaller urban systems. In this paper, we take advantage of these varied contexts to identify the puzzles involved in meeting the leadership development needs of these very different school systems. This is an unusual research project in that our focus is not on the efficacy or impact of the programs. It is too early to know results of our efforts. Further, far too much literature on program redesign is after-the-fact recounting of "what went right" or "what could be done differently." To the extent there are findings associated with this research, they involve the opportunity to reflect on central decision-making and problem-solving outcomes, and the discernment of significant questions teams confronted en route to designing their programs. Our approach is inspired by the theoretical work of Weick (1979, 1995, 2001; Weick, Sutcliffe & Obstfeld, 2005), who suggests that organizing is a dynamic process revealed through "sensemaking" after the fact. An inherently social process, sensemaking is dependent on negotiating meaning. From a Weickian perspective, reflecting on the redesign process, and sharing these reflections, is critical to the social process of building an understanding of program redesign. While not sufficient unto itself to ensure change, such reflection is necessary to make departure from previous norms possible.

Results

In a piece on successful principal leadership, Leithwood (2005) made the point that "successful leadership practices are common across contexts in their general form but highly adaptable and contingent in their specific enactment" (pp. 621-622). A similar observation applies to the designs of the leadership preparation programs in these three partnerships. The design questions that each partnership team is wrestling with represent similarities among the projects; each team wrestled with a common set of puzzles that were derived through their discussions. In their enactment, however, differences are represented in the manner in which each partnership team answered these questions, reflecting the varied strategic priorities of each district and the need to ensure that programs fit well with districts' cultures. The sections below reveal the common design questions each partnership team discussed, and for each, a key trade-off teams confronted in order to create their program.

Question 1: How would the partnership teams recruit and select candidates? Selecting candidates for education leadership programs often involves criteria that have little to do with leadership potential, such as admitting enough candidates to keep the program financially viable or maintaining good relations with neighboring school districts. The trade-off for this question amounts to a choice between quantity and selectivity. The dialogue resulted in determining how best to ensure that students were committed to pursuing a leadership position, while gauging their potential as effective leaders. In the end, each partnership team opted to depart from traditional university-type admissions processes, instead devising procedures that were time and personnel intensive in order to glean as much information as possible about aspirants' leadership and academic potential. Thus, as examples, in addition to typical university admissions processes, applicants engaged in a performance-based in-basket activity in one district, and submitted a portfolio of leadership accomplishments in two others. This resulted in a surprise when enacted: Faced with a rigorous selection process, in the two grant-supported pilots prospective students with a lukewarm interest in school leadership simply did not apply (despite the fact that the grants pay the lion's share of tuition).

Question 2: How would the curriculum be structured and delivered? In all three projects, the teams wrestled with the nature of the formal coursework students would experience. An observation was made that university-based programs treat all students as if they have the same learning needs, a point also made by Portin, Schneider, DeArmond, and Gundlach, (2003). In practice, of course, not only does each aspirant come with different knowledge, skills, and dispositions, but individual school systems stress different content themes. For example, in one of the pilot programs, the district seeks to hire and develop leaders who have considerable research skills; in another, the emphasis is on instructional supervision. Thus the dilemma here involved providing flexibility and a tailor-made program of study that fit districts' priorities and students' learning needs, rather than adhering to a rigid, pre-defined course structure.

All three teams sought to create a curriculum framework that employs a more flexible, individualized program of study. In its general form, then, the emphasis here is on recognizing that students' needs are different, as are the partner school systems themselves, hence the designs strive to introduce a more differentiated curriculum. In their specific enactment, each program approaches this in different ways: one includes online, case-oriented coursework; another employs shorter, modular courses emphasizing specific proficiencies. Differentiation was also sought in the context of field-based experiences and mentoring structures, discussed below.

Question 3: How will high-quality clinical experiences be integrated into the programs?

Each planning team was concerned about providing meaningful clinical experiences. Though internships hold great promise, they easily devolve into site supervisors checking off lists of activities rather than interns engaging in meaningful leadership opportunities through which they are coached and nurtured. For the internship question, the puzzle lies in providing a relevant array of authentic school leadership experiences with students who for the most part work full-time as teachers. The trade-off here involves a cost-benefit calculation. The best-case scenario is a fulltime placement as administrative intern, which is prohibitively costly. Instead, planning teams opted to experiment with combinations of summer placements, release days, team projects, and other structures that maximize on-the-job learning. Our partnerships negotiated this problem by focusing on school improvement experiences for candidates. Specifically, the curricula in all three partnerships require students to engage in principal-approved school improvement projects at their sites. The school improvement projects are integrated into the broader internship supported with classroom content. Early portions of the curricula help students to think about schools and districts from an organizational perspective, provide tools for problem articulation and evidence-based action, and train students to work collaboratively with challenging partners. Despite the common characteristics of clinical experiences, differing local needs and opportunities demanded variations in enactment of field-based experiences. One partnership includes mandatory work during summer school, another takes place during the entire academic year, and the third explicitly combines the internship with a team-designed school improvement initiative. In the last case, funding is available to augment the delivery of field projects. Students must complete a standard grant application, conduct research to support their course of action, maintain the project budget, oversee the enactment of the project, evaluate it, and present a summative report to the steering committee.

Question 4: How will candidates be supported during their program of study? Each planning team considered ongoing support of candidates to be an important part of the program. The puzzle lies in figuring out how to promote a quality mentoring relationship for students, and then to maintain appropriate assistance during induction into their leadership position. Although the enactment of support structures varies among the three pilots, there tended to be three common types of support.

First, students have a university advisor, with whom they complete an individualized learning and internship plan. This promotes differentiated field-based learning experiences for students. Second, in addition to a field advisor to facilitate internship activities, students will be assigned a mentor from another school. Mentors focus on providing authentic experiences in alternative settings and serving as an advisor throughout the program and induction period. The specific enactment of mentoring varies. In one of the projects, mentors will be administrators on a different level than proteges, and students will be provided release time to engage in practicum activities in their mentors' schools. In another, the mentors are recently retired principals. In the third, mentors are recently-hired assistant principals, who will engage in an ongoing dialogue about their experiences during the transition from the classroom to administration. Finally, students in all three projects will form five-person critical friends teams, which are intended to engage in a process modeled after medical school "intern rounds." Using a protocol based on Osterman and Kottkamp's (2004) work on reflective practice, these teams will meet monthly, allowing students to visit each others' schools and to problem-solve and network. Teams are intended to stay intact after the formal educational programs finish, hence providing some ongoing support during induction.

The tripartite approach to support addresses student needs to both develop as leaders and to become socialized to leadership norms in their districts. During the program, students need a university professor and field advisor to help them design and negotiate their internships, learn the administrative processes used in their districts, and offer ongoing feedback. Mentors provide career advice, inside information on how the district really works, and focus on developing the dispositions and habits of mind associated with leadership. Critical friend teams offer a network of colleagues who are facing the same experiences, and who can support each other as they move on to the next stages of their careers.

Discussion

In this paper, we focus on a select number of decisions faced by each of three planning teams engaged in designing leadership development programs and how they are responding to the needs of their various constituencies. The program designs represent the theories of action espoused by those responsible for enacting these three programs and serve as examples of how university program flexibility can meet varying needs.

The questions highlighted above converge with those raised by critics like Levine, questions having to do with the selection of aspirants, curricular relevance, and the quality of clinical experiences. Each question represents a puzzle that education leadership faculty and school systems need to solve; the answers are shaped by a series of trade-offs. The dilemmas, the strategies, and the choices available are common to similar assemblies nationwide. From our perspective, the specific answers to the various puzzles are less important than the learning that takes place among partners who share the goal of developing well-prepared leaders for tomorrow's schools. The designs are context specific, a matter of fit between partners' and students' needs and a program's capacity to facilitate the learning process. The dialogue between school districts and university leadership programs produces a negotiated outcome. The discussion is shaped by an understanding that experimentation requires tolerance for ambiguity, a commitment to learning, and willingness to discuss the undiscussables--including the ways graduate programs have failed to meet the needs of their clients.

Participation in these projects has taught us that while an authentic dialogue with district partners may be shaped by a common set of questions, we must also strive to understand and accommodate the strategic priorities of the districts we serve, and to continue to explore different ways to respond to their practical needs. Process is as important as product in this regard; meeting districts' needs for well-prepared school leaders requires avoiding "one size fits all" options for enactment of programs, and finding ways to differentiate what we offer.

References

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Scott C. Bauer, George Mason University 

S. David Brazer, George Mason University

Bauer, Ph.D., is Associate Professor and Coordinator of the Education Leadership Program and Brazer, Ph.D., is Assistant Professor of Education Leadership.