Accepting Educational Responsibility: Preparing Administrators to Lead Inclusive Schools

Educational leaders are expected to lead schools for increased outcomes for all students. Effective leadership of inclusive schools requires certain skills and dispositions. However, many principals do not have background in special education and there is criticism that educational leadership preparation programs are inadequately preparing aspiring school leaders. In this study, we surveyed graduate students in a leadership preparation program to understand their perceptions of their knowledge and skills related to leading inclusive schools. The results of the study contribute to the body of research regarding curricular and experiential changes needed in preparation programs to prepare leaders for inclusive schools.

Disrupting Dysconsciousness: Confronting Anti-Blackness in Educational Leadership Preparation Programs

This article examines liberatory pedagogical practices utilized in graduate level courses offered within an educational leadership preparation program (ELPP). The research explores how these tools support the development of culturally responsive school leadership and actively anti-racist leaders in a program purporting to develop social justice-oriented school leaders. The author analyzes data collected from student course evaluations (SCEs) and assignments in courses taught across two years. Findings indicate that students perceived the liberatory pedagogical practices employed within the course to be vital in pushing them towards disrupting the pathologies of racism and anti-Blackness cultivated during their primary through post-secondary schooling experiences. The findings also indicated that students responded positively to the use of liberatory pedagogical practices and frameworks that centered race and explicitly used race language.

Program Capacity for Redesign in Educational Leadership Preparation

Characteristics that contribute to successful redesign and launch of principal preparation programs may be understood collectively as the capacity of those programs. A model of capacity for redesign of principal preparation programs should strike a balance between the technical and professional aspects of teaching and leadership and the cultural and relational aspects of organizations. We surveyed a national sample of program directors and interviewed a purposive sample of those in the midst of redesigning their programs to arrive at a framework of the tools and raw materials programs need to meet the new demands of principal preparation.

Place-Based Educational Leadership

Understanding, shaping, and mediating the unique contexts and communities in which schools are located offers a unique approach to educational-leadership preparation. The emerging frame of PLACE describes a place-based leading and learning framework for educational-leadership preparation that uses a combination of concept-based curricula that includes practice and problem-solving in context, bridging culture and community, arts and humanities pedagogies, creative evaluation and engagement, and leadership for context rather than for region that includes followership models. Place-based educational leadership focuses on context-based professional practice that has a direct bearing on the well-being of individuals in the school ecology and the larger ecologies in which they live and work.

(Inter)Active Learning Tools and Pedagogical Strategies in Educational Leadership Preparation

This article presents three types of (inter)active learning pedagogical tools to better prepare future administrators for complex, real-world tasks. We propose a framework of narrative linearity and responsiveness to examine digital cases, digital simulations, and clinical simulations as bridging pedagogies from abstract class-based methods to fully immersive internships. We illustrate how these characteristics influence learner interaction with the rich, hypothetical contexts these tools offer. A specific example is presented for each tool, and their cognitive demands on the learner are discussed. We raise implications for their use at the course and program levels.