Educational Leadership Course Research Articles

Policy work in educational leadership courses: university teachers’ interpretations, translations and engagements

ABSTRACT This study investigates policy work in educational leadership courses at universities. It analyses the types of engagement present in university teachers’ policy work and in their interpretations and translations of policy intentions into teaching designs and practices. The study illustrates policy work as a phenomenon and draws on the theory of policy work; it examines one case from Norway and one from California. The data has been analysed through discourse analysis. Observational data and materials from teaching practices constituted the supporting data, while contextual interviews with university teachers formed the main data. In both cases, various types of engagement were identified, which reflected academic freedom and different policy contexts. The analysis also revealed that university lecturers use their professional discretion and experience when interpreting and translating policy intentions into teaching designs and practices. This has implications for higher education administration, especially for the achievement of coherence across programmes and courses.

Developing reflection and critical thinking in a leadership education course: leading learning and change

ABSTRACT In higher education learning environments, critical thinking is often an assumed skill; however, many students require explicit support to effectively achieve in this area. This research focuses on the application of scaffolded learning experiences to promote reflection and critical thinking in a post-graduate educational leadership course. It particularly recognises the unique challenges for international students, managing their transition into a culturally different learning environment while meeting the academic and critical thinking demands of higher education. This research draws on two main data sources: student survey responses regarding reflections on the concept of leadership and researcher reflections on student engagement and critical thinking. Descriptive analysis provided profiles of the student cohort and their views on leadership. Three themes emerged from the analysis of open-ended responses regarding views on leadership: diverse understandings of leadership; the importance of leadership actions for change; and evaluating leadership – self and others. Reflections from one researcher on the conduct of the course and student work provided a link between the initial design and student outcomes. Two levels of positive outcomes were found. Firstly, a greater level of early engagement in course learning activities was observed which continued across the course. Secondly, students’ learning and achievement were greater than a previous cohort implying the benefits of early modelling of reflective practices to scaffold students’ critical thinking. Importantly, stronger tutorial engagement supporting critical reflections is likely to translate to other post-graduate studies. Recommendations for further research on students’ engagement and critical thinking are proposed.

Reflections on Race and Privilege in an Educational Leadership Course

To be effective social justice leaders, school leaders need to gain critical understandings of their positionality and racial privilege and be prepared to engage in difficult conversations with others. This study examines how a peer-to-peer letter exchange assignment in a doctoral course allowed educational leadership doctoral students ( N = 27) to reflect on race and privilege with each other. The findings reveal how students examined racial privilege, positionality, and bias. The authors discuss how this assignment can be used in educational leadership programs to develop and grow the practice of critical reflection for self-examination of privilege.

The Challenge of Providing High-Quality Feedback Online: Building a Culture of Continuous Improvement in an Online Course for Adult Learners

Scholars of online learning have acknowledged the additional challenges an online format poses to relationship building and providing effective feedback. This article describes the authors' experiences providing feedback to adult learners in an online educational leadership course, the challenges they encountered in providing this feedback in a timeframe and manner to which students were receptive, and their research into how to build a culture of continuous improvement in an online course for adult learners. The authors conclude that effective online feedback occurs when course projects are sequenced to provide opportunities for students to receive and engage with feedback formatively, when instructors set clear expectations about feedback timelines, and when instructors take advantage of the variety of feedback mechanisms online environments can provide, including peer and instructor feedback, as well as self-reflection.

A New Civil Rights Campaign? Policies and Practices to Support Students’ Gender Diversity

Ms. Barnard is faced with a complex dilemma. The district administrator in charge of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) initiatives and support was presented with a case of a transgender student who wished to attend an overnight field trip and share a room with other students based on her gender identity. Although the district had made previous headway in formatting district policies to fit the needs of transgender students, no procedural directive was available to respond to this new situation. In addition, the superintendent of the district was unsupportive of transgender students. The case was developed for an educational leadership course so that students can discuss the legal issues, role and value conflicts, and theoretical perspective informing policy and practice.

See the Connections? Addressing Leadership and Supervision Challenges to Support Improved Student Achievement in a Small Rural School

This case study was developed for educational leadership courses addressing supervision and school improvement. Various data are presented for students to analyze and identify key concerns at a low-performing, rural, racially diverse, K-8 school. It challenges leadership candidates to recognize interrelated problems and solutions in a school. Students are asked to prioritize responses to issues of changing school leadership, professional development to address teacher expectations, English Language Arts achievement, instructional and disciplinary practices, student behaviors and attendance, and parent engagement practices. They will develop a specific schoolwide professional development plan within an overall School Improvement Plan to address these concerns.

Social Media and the First Amendment: Educators’ Trap Game

Monica Williams, a beloved counselor of an urban middle school, is shocked to learn that she is being terminated for a comment she made on Facebook. This case was developed for use in an educational leadership course for students to evaluate an educator’s right to freedom of speech in relation to social media. Instructors can use the case to encourage dialogue around legal issues and ethical considerations of an individual’s rights versus community standards. The discussion questions are designed to guide students in analyzing the scenario through legal policies, ethical considerations, and human resource issues.

Building collective leadership capacity using collaborative twenty-first century digital tools

ABSTRACTThe current research explores how using collaborative twenty-first century digital tools developed the collective leadership capacity among participants in an educational leadership course. A qualitative interpretive approach was used. The data show how learning within the digital collaborative spaces was multidirectional and enhanced the possibilities of each student’s learning and practice. Communicating, curating and sharing knowledge, led to the development of new insights and support of mutual practice. The authors argue that the group’s collaborative endeavours produced substantive collective knowledge that elevated practice, and in so doing created collective leadership capacity within educational institutions and organisations in Trinidad and Tobago.

Stuffed in a Locker: A Case Study Involving Guns on Campus

Ensuring that children are safe is imperative for any educational institution. This case presents a realistic scenario of the safety concerns of leaders and staff in a middle school concerned with potential gang activity. Inspired by actual events, this case illustrates burdens that many middle school leaders across the nation face on a daily basis—weapons on campus. Potential legal issues surrounding this case study are prosecution of the students involved, student access to weapons, lack of oversight on the part of parents, and proper notification of parents of students who were potential victims. This case study could be used in educational leadership courses that focus on educational law and supervision.

Design and Intervention of an Educational-Leadership Program: Student Voice and Agency, Expectations and Internationalization

This paper explores the lived experiences of a diverse student cohort enrolled in a master’s degree educational-leadership program. The program’s global focus was on the quality of teacher education, prospective teachers’ workplace preparedness and leaders in the workforce in higher education. Internationalization, real-life experiences and student voice served as an enacted intervention curriculum for an educational leadership course designed to reveal the gap between theory and practice. An epistemological diversity lens stimulated critical reflection on students’ participation in the course design and its connection to realities in the field. Diverse higher-education classrooms pose specific challenges for educational leadership programs in including effective internationalization, workplace relevance and improving the generalizability and content validity of the educational leadership course. This small qualitative exploratory investigation provides an in-depth understanding of the value of student voice in informing course and program design. Interviews, observations, two surveys and a document analysis triangulated the data and provided information on the complexities in higher-education classrooms. The findings focus on teacher-educators and higher-education classroom management as well as on the value of critical inquiry, reflection and intervention for existing course designs and transformation.

Trade-Offs at Ella Baker Public Charter School

This case was written for educational leadership courses, especially ones focused on organizational change. The case explores a principal’s first year at school where the student achievement and school climate were not meeting the school’s lofty mission. Readers of the case should consider the steps and perspectives taken by the principal during her first year.

“This Too Shall Pass”

The story of the past 15 years in U.S. education has been one of fundamental reform and transformation. These changes are felt most acutely in the daily lives of teachers and principals and often have lasting effects on the context of the school community. This case study explores the challenges facing a principal when attempting reform and improvement efforts set in a larger backdrop of social and economic change. This case involves issues related to understanding school context and improving communication skills for new principals and can be used for principal preparation and educational leadership courses.

The Yearbook Photo and Graduation Speech

Only 48.6% of University Council For Educational Administration (UCEA) institutions which focus on social justice in principal preparation programs address sexual orientation, this case describes how the completion of an equity audit for an educational leadership course compelled Principal Olson to reflect on his identity as a social justice leader. The racial identity development of Principal Olson led him to understand his own Whiteness and privilege and how his actions not only marginalized students of color but also students who are lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, or questioning (LGBTQ). The day before graduation, Principal Olson listened as the class president rehearsed her speech where she told the audience she is transgender. This is not a debate of whether the speech should be given, but the issue is how Principal Olson will respond when questioned.

Developing School Leaders through the Arts

Three independently developed educational leadership courses used the arts to depart from lecture and passive learning, prime students to solve school problems creatively, and build social justice awareness. Photo captioning was used to promote intrapersonal leadership development around professional identity formation and social justice awareness (Case 1). Arts-based activities, such as sculpture making from found objects, were used to illustrate school visions and hone interpersonal skills (Case 2). Lastly, improvisational theater role-playing was used to develop organizational goals around effective teamwork, collaboration and a positive school culture (Case 3). The cases are compared, and students’ dispositional responses are discussed with implications for arts-based leadership research.

Curriculum leadership in global context: a self-study of educational leadership teaching practices

There is at best an emergent body of scholarship about the specific ways that the forces of globalization relate to the work of educators in the US, educational leadership programmes and their faculty. This research, structured with a four-tier model grounded in the self-study methodology, contributes to this body of literature. It explores our experiences teaching curriculum leadership courses in university-based preparation programmes, highlighting the intersection of globalization and our experiences in the educational leadership course room through the lenses of curriculum leadership and teaching practices. Our iterative analytic process draws on course syllabi, 75 pages of epistolary dialogue, 12 hours of teleconferences and 20 pages of meeting notes to make its assertions about the value of self-study research in educational leadership, the adaptive role of the leader educator in the twenty-first century, and the necessity of a glocalized, ideological course room in an era of globalization. Further, we submit that the reframing process inherent in self-study research surfaces awareness of the classroom as part of a larger global commons, thereby promoting empathy and counteracting the forces of isolation and dehumanization that can accompany globalization.

A Feather in Her Cap

In this case, the authors explore the tensions that emerge when students exert their right to visibly demonstrate their cultural values and beliefs at school or school-sponsored activities and events. This case was designed for educational leadership courses dealing with diversity, pluralism, multiculturalism, and democratic values. Students should be encouraged to discuss pluralism and democratic education juxtaposed with multiculturalism. They should consider ways in which the principal and teachers in this case either missed or tried to use opportunities to engage students in transformative, cross-cultural pedagogies that could prove to be socially reconstructive.

Metaphors of leadership and spatialized practice

In our nation’s schools, there is an ‘othered’ nature of space—the fact that spaces are not discourse-neutral and serve to entrap individuals in certain representations, roles, contracts, hierarchies and other hegemonic processes. This paper focuses on research on the use of photo-elicitation, critical geography and metaphor as tools of representation, analysis and reflection of problems of practice and spatialized practices in schools. Participants were students in a graduate educational leadership courses. Preliminary analysis has given insights into how students in leadership preparation programmes begin to develop their identities as future educational leaders and how they interpret problems of schooling. Providing students with the opportunity to critically examine how spaces in and around schools convey messages about taken-for-granted leadership practices and expectations for the role empowers them. Pre-service leaders can develop their own identities and become leaders engaged in creating more socially just schools that serve the needs of all students.

How the Leader Leads Now? The Impact of Educational Leadership Course on Leadership Practices of School Heads

Despite the fact that school leadership has tremendous role in school improvement, little attention has been paid on building the capacity of head teachers in developing context especially in rural Pakistan. This study reports the impact of an educational leadership course conducted for head teachers coming from various sectors in context of rural Pakistan. Drawing on the data collected from head teachers, teachers and parents through interviews and observations, the study finds that the leadership course had a positive impact upon the practices of the studied head teachers. They arrange more frequent meetings and discussions inside schools, value teachers’ voice, try to address teachers’ academic issues and have better and greater relations with the community. Similarly, they have implemented the concept of action research to improve their practices. However, they have not been able to sustain the practice of action research and to fully engage teachers in their ongoing development. The study suggests that future in-service courses conducted for head teachers should focus more on providing them with more ideas and skills to sustain the innovations.

Introducing undergraduate students to school leadership concepts

PurposeThis paper aims to investigate the role of an under‐graduate educational leadership in introducing students to the complexity of school leadership practice.Design/methodology/approachTheoretically informed by Bourdieuian social theory and drawing on a questionnaire with a cohort of students, the paper evaluates a course in relation to achieving its outcomes.FindingsAn analysis of student responses indicates that the course did introduce students to school leadership practice and assist in the construction of a school leadership disposition.Research limitations/implicationsThe theoretical resources used in the paper have significant implications for how researchers conceive of school leadership practice. Therefore, this paper may be the basis of further work.Practical implicationsThe findings of this work have implications for teacher educators and specifically universities. From this paper, the inclusion of an educational leadership course in under‐graduate programs should become more the norm rather than the exception.Originality/valueThis paper has value in two unique ways. First, there has been very little work undertaken on the role of educational leadership courses in under‐graduate programs and in the context of increased political attention and no formal pre‐requisites for the principalship in Australia, this work is both timely and significant. Second, this paper works with a sophisticated notion of school leadership practice and its location using social theory, a perspective that is uncommon in much of the literature on educational leadership.

Breaking News: Utilizing Video Simulations to Improve Educational Leaders' Public Speaking Skills

This article examines specific uses of video simulations in one educational leadership preparation program to advance future school and district leaders' skills related to public speaking and participation in televised news interviews. One faculty member and two advanced educational leadership candidates share their perspectives of several applications of advanced technologies, including one-on-one video simulations with the instructor and collaborative peer review of video portfolios. Finally, the authors provide links to multimedia examples of these digital artifacts from an advanced educational leadership course, titled Effective Practices: Media, Government & Public Communications, offered at the University of Missouri-Kansas City.