A r c h i v e d  I n f o r m a t i o n

How Can We Prepare New Leaders?

Preparing tomorrow's leaders is another essential step. Forum participants were outspoken in their views that university preparation programs for educational leaders are not doing the job. Much of their curriculum centers on management, finance, legal issues, and other state-required content, with instructional and school improvement issues given short shrift. Often the faculty in these programs do not model what we know about good teaching?so that an Ed.D. candidate might well learn about classroom methods for cooperative learning from a professor teaching in a lecture mode. Opportunities for learning leadership in real school settings are limited to fixed periods, rather than infused throughout the curriculum. Candidates are deemed ready for a leadership job based on how many credits they have accumulated, rather than how well they perform in a school situation.

Addressing these shortcomings in preparation requires more than just changing university curricula. It will entail coordinated changes in certification, licensing, and hiring, and is unlikely to happen without a shakeup of the "cartel" of institutions with a vested interest in the status quo, including universities, state departments of education, professional associations, and school districts.

Several suggestions emerged from the Forum about how to improve preparation programs. Very few, if any, university preparation programs have incorporated all of the recommended changes, but some school districts and universities are trying out improvements on a more limited scale.

More Practical Leadership Opportunities

People learn leadership by actually leading?and by having simultaneous opportunities to reflect on what they are doing, and to talk about the process with others. Participants in the Policy Forum advocated bringing a more practical and realistic orientation to preparation programs. Instead of learning mostly through traditional university courses, leadership candidates would spend much of their time in schools, learning through exposure to real challenges, interaction with successful leaders, and guided inquiry into real problems.

For example, Stanford University prepares prospective principals by combining three summers of resident study at the university with two intervening school years of field work at the home school. The field work component, which is overseen by a university field supervisor and an administrator in the home school, helps participants learn to critically examine their school culture, supervise and evaluate teachers, and lead change initiatives.

Implementing this kind of preparation will entail new kinds of partnerships between school districts and universities. The district offers a setting replete with real problems and a host of experienced people to interact with. A university can provide the intellectual foundations and can encourage students to think deeply and creatively about what they are experiencing. For this approach to work on a large scale, however, universities must develop incentive structures that reward faculty for collaborating with schools. Supervision apprenticeships are one promising approach. These arrangements allow prospective leaders to face the gamut of challenges found in real school districts, but with the guidance of an experienced mentor. Mentors also gain new insights into leadership from these relationships, as apprentices bring fresh perspectives to old problems.

Some preparation programs are building their learning around grounded research, which means that leadership candidates spend considerable time in schools investigating a meaningful problem of real import to educators:

• Claremont Graduate University is preparing urban superintendents through a model that includes Socratic seminars on urban issues, strategic briefings and group discussions of leadership, and grounded research projects.

• At Harvard University's summer leadership institute, cross-role teams of teachers and administrators work on common problems, so that people understand that leadership is a shared responsibility.

Instructional Expertise

Preparation programs also should place much stronger emphasis on instructional issues, according to many Forum participants. Some participants even felt that principals should know as much about instruction as a nationally board certified teacher. Preparation programs could build the instructional skills of leaders by incorporating more classroom teaching experiences into their training.

Growing Your Own Leaders

Traditional preparation programs are unlikely to produce enough principals and superintendents to fill impending shortages. According to Forum participants, school districts must expand the pool of new leaders by "growing their own"-recognizing potential leaders in the district and giving them structured opportunities to demonstrate their skills and build their expertise.

• San Antonio Public Schools created "instructional guides" in each school--expert teachers with leadership potential who help others improve their teaching. Instructional guides receive intensive professional development, and the superintendent has made clear that she expects many future principals to come from their ranks.

• Community District #2 is working with New York University to develop a program to certify excellent teachers with leadership potential as principals. Participants are identified and recruited by current principals. The district pays their toward certification.

Institutional Support

Right now many leadership candidates pursue degrees through part-time study, on evenings, weekends, and summers, and pay for it themselves. This is far from the ideal of providing leadership candidates with stipends and release time, so they can truly focus on learning. Some school districts and states are trying to remedy this by paying tuition, stipends, or even a full salary to teachers with leadership potential, to allow them to spend a year or 2 in a preparation and apprenticeship program. North Carolina, for example, pays principals a $20,000 annual scholarship to pursue advanced degrees and leadership training. These types of scholarship programs often create stronger incentives for both the participant and the funding agency to see that the outcome is successful.

Addressing Inadequate Programs

A difficult step in reforming administrator preparation is to strengthen university leadership preparation programs, and in some in some cases to eliminate those that aren't working. For example, North Carolina has required all the universities in the state with a leadership program to submit proposals to reform their programs. The number of these programs has already declined from 12 to 7.

Some participants felt that university preparation programs were unlikely to initiate productive reforms without a wake-up call from the outside. One suggestion was for school districts, businesses, and other players to develop their own preparation and professional development programs in in competition with universities. If decisions about which administrators to hire are based on a candidate's competence, not credit accumulation, alternative programs could pose a serious threat that would spur traditional university preparation programs to do better.

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