Teaching Leadership and Teaching Leaders.

Welcome to our inaugural "Leadership" feature topic. Our purpose in creating this topic is to provide a forum for instructors, scholars and leaders in all fields and who advance the growth of those who currently lead others. Fifteen "Leadership" manuscripts will be included in this issue. While our frames of reference may differ, one unifying focus is teaching: how instructors teach future leaders; what leaders do to teach others; and the pedagogical grounding for both. Let me share briefly the interesting scholarship in this issue.

McFadden, Eakin, Beck-Frazier, and McGlone synthesize many theories of leadership and help us understand how we can meaningfully present this synthesis to aspiring leaders. Edgar Schein has noted that a culture is built, in part, by what a leader models or teaches. In this vein, Barbour and Harrell demonstrate how leaders build teams based on the types of conversations they provide during stages of teaming. Additionally, several scholars suggest we ought to develop leaders whose focus is improving schools. While Quinn shares researched-based strategies principals can employ to influence teacher retention, Olson notes from her research how principals can increase teachers' leadership capacity. Houle proposes that if we teach leaders to conduct their own action research projects, they will make decisions necessary to improve schools; and Mansberger argues for university instructors to help current leaders move beyond technical know-how to engage followers to a higher moral purpose by teaching emerging leaders how to organize people and resources.

In the university classroom, Poppink teaches her future school leaders to understand curriculum development by first understanding the underlying assumptions about knowledge, learning and teaching. Marcellino crosses boundaries of education and business leadership to share results of a university classroom study, that team contracts and instructional monitoring help provide foundational support to emerging teams and their leaders; and, Brazer, Sparrgrove, and Garvey help us to understand that university instructors will increase their use of video and recording technology to improve performance-based assessment if the instructors perceive the technology to have utility and ease-in-use. From Anderson's research on conflict management, we learn that principal preparation programs ought to intensify conflict training with school-based activities. Friedland discovered that graduate students more easily learned supervisory skills with an integrated process of reflection and feedback, knowledge and reality-based experiences. When developing authentic, field-based experiences for teacher-leaders, however, Bauer, Haydel and Cody discovered that students have a difficult time negotiating the demands of a performance-based program, representing a significant challenge for reculturing the graduate experience.

Margaret Mead stated, "Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it's the only thing that ever has." We hope that this resource provides an opportunity for thoughtful and committed scholars and teachers of leadership and leaders to share their work. If you teach leadership and leaders and want to make a difference, please consider contributing to our next issue.

JoAnn Danelo Barbour, Ph. D.

Associate Professor of Educational Leadership, Texas Woman's University