Professional development for transformational change: findings from the lilead fellows program

Abstract

ABSTRACT The Lilead Fellows Program is an intensive professional development opportunity designed to support district-level library supervisors in the United States as they planned for transformational change in their districts. Throughout the programme, Fellows developed a project to implement in their districts. We conducted a qualitative content analysis (QCA) to systematically describe how the Fellows planned for and promoted transformational change within their districts through these projects. We collected the Fellows’ initial application essays and final project presentation scripts to show how the projects evolved over the 18-month programme. Through an iterative open coding process, we developed and revised a coding frame to include the initial and final themes represented in the projects. Findings revealed that throughout the programme, participants made significant shifts in their projects’ foci. These shifts were a result of realising that a different, but related, aspect of their proposed project needed to be addressed before they could tackle their initial goal. The participants’ final projects addressed three main themes: district affairs, professional development, and/or advocacy. In this paper, we describe how the projects evolved over the course of the programme, the final projects’ themes and subthemes, and how the Fellows promoted transformational change in their districts through their projects.