Blazing New Trails - Connexions

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338 CRITICAL ISSUES IN EDUCATION LEADERSHIP PREPARATION Recruitment. The first step in this decentralized approach to turnaround professional development was to recruit candidates from schools and districts who wanted to improve and strengthen their educational leadership skills and competencies in order to turnaround their failing schools or be proactive and prevent their schools from slipping into a turnaround situation. Unlike current turnaround programs, the turnaround professional development model allows candidates to enter the program while staying at their current school site. Rather than districts being the driving force behind choosing candidates based on the centralized guidelines that often serve as roadblocks to participation in existing turnaround programs, the turnaround candidate can select to participate in the professional development model and work with their school and district to complete an application for participation based on component two of the model, Selection Criteria. Selection criteria. Who is this educational leader that will be selected to participate in the turnaround professional development program? The targeted educational leader (school principal) needs to be dedicated to the school, students, and school community. The leader must be focused on engaging the school and all its stakeholders in intense outcome and action driven goals that focus on the overall improvement of student achievement and turning around the failing school. A sufficient amount of self-confidence and self-efficacy is needed; he or she must possess and have the ability to refine, develop, and strengthen the four major clusters of competencies and dispositions of a turnaround leader as outlined in School Turnaround Leaders: Competencies for Success Competence at Work (Spencer & Spencer, 1993). This includes the initiative, persistence, and determination to implement and follow through to completion all components of the turnaround professional development program while at the same time ensuring buy-in from school personnel and students. In addition, it is equally important that the selected participant have the support of his or her superintendent and other district-level leadership as well as all stakeholders impacting the participating school site. This participant needs to be able to empower and influence others to work and achieve aggressive data-driven educational gains together as a team highly focused on improving student achievement and overall school turnaround. Problem solving skills and the ability to be an analytical and conceptual thinker and implement shared leadership through ongoing team building and faculty and stakeholder buy-in are critical. Ultimately, more emphasis and ownership will be placed on team leadership with decision-making among faculty. As candidates experience the day-to-day events of their environmental work, they must process new concepts, respond accordingly, and be willing to adjust and change as needed. Flexibility and responsiveness will be key. The ultimate goal of the Educational Turnaround Leader is improved student achievement and establishing a culture of high performance. Beginning with the end in mind, the first step is self diagnosis in order to make a personal professional development plan to develop the core competencies. These competencies allow a leader to be able to influence others to work as a collaborative team, a problem solver, and an analytical and conceptual thinker (Steiner, Hassel, Hassel, Valsing, & Crittenden, 2008). In turn, each member of the school staff will self diagnose and create a plan for strengthening core teaching competencies. The targeted educational turnaround leader (school principal) will make an informed and driven choice to turnaround his or her school and seek the tools to make it possible. The school site must be assessed for strengths and weaknesses of core beliefs, strategic structures and distributed accountability that should be found in a high performance school culture. School characteristics and school rankings are imperative in the identification of the site; the selected school must be at a pivotal point in its school improvement process.
<strong>Blazing</strong> a <strong>New</strong> Trail for the Educational Turnaround Leader 339 The optimal school site should be at a point prior to being on the verge of school take over and within the two to three years of school decline in order to maximize the potential for success. The socioeconomic make-up of the school is important as well as the history of neighborhoods and populations greatly impact both short and long term achievement gains. The school site’s history of evolution in the areas of culture and climate will also have an impact in the selection criteria. The school leader, faculty, district, and all stakeholders must choose to be completely invested in the Educational Turnaround Leadership Professional Development Model in order to promote and advance the development of turnaround competencies to their highest level. The learning curve will be very steep as new concepts are developed and put into action. Ideally, the new turnaround candidate will be supported by an experienced and successful advocate or mentor who has turned around a failing school or can serve as a voice at the local level to provide them with the flexibility needed in local policy, personnel, and resources to fully implement and carry each of the curriculum modules as they work toward school turnaround. This professional development program should be anticipated to span approximately two years during which the modules will be implemented and a third year to monitor ongoing growth and work towards sustaining and continuous improvement of achievement gains accomplished. Curriculum. The proposed curriculum was derived from a review of existing turnaround programs, Leadership Competencies (Steiner, 2009), Leadership Curriculum Modules (SREB, 2006), and other turnaround or leadership focused research cited in the Literature Review on education turnarounds. Throughout the integrated literature review, the following six overarching themes emerged for the focus and development of the proposed turnaround professional development model’s curriculum modules (see Figure 2.). The Educational Turnaround Leader Professional Development Curriculum outlines these six modules. Implementation, evaluation, and ongoing assessment. The Implementation, Evaluation, and Ongoing Assessment component of the model focuses on data-driven decision making, a commitment to implementing the six modules and setting data-driven goals and action plans that are based on sound research and evaluated for impact. Results will be seen in the data collected throughout the days, weeks and months of each school year of participation and during the final year where work is focused on sustaining and improving turnaround gains and successes. Data rooms and walls will be a natural part of the physical building where teams of educators meet often to conduct ongoing evaluation, analyze and plan future practices, strategies, instructional interventions, collaboration, and accountability for continued growth and student achievement. According to Skytt and Contour (2000), action research has the ability to greatly enhance both professional development and school improvement. Educational action research attempts to solve real problems (O'Brien, 2001). Though the methodologies carry a variety of names, the models contain four common aspects which are cyclical in nature: planning, action, observation, and reflection. In addition, each new success or failure can change the direction of the action plan (Skytt & Contour, 2000). There is a real opportunity to brainstorm as a team of professionals, and to make adjustments based on outcomes and progress as each module is implemented. Reflection provides a forum for all participants to synthesize the collected data; through this ongoing process everyone can become more effective in the turnaround process (Downey, Steffy, English, Frase, & Poston, 2004). The overarching evidence of success will be found in the quantitative data that shows a significant improvement in test scores and overall school improvement.
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20 NCPEA 11 BLAZING NEW TRAILS: Pre
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NCPEA EXECUTIVE BOARD 2010-2011 Pre
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NCPEA HONOR ROLL OF PRESIDENTS, 194
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TABLE OF CONTENTS Contributing Auth
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Betty J. Alford, Stephen F. Austin
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xii Yearbook Reviewers Kenneth Rasm
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INVITED CHAPTERS PART 1
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4 PRESIDENT’S MESSAGE (3) The fed
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Shadows and Images II 7 LIVING LEGE
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Shadows and Images II 11 settings,
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Shadows and Images II 13 into the m
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16 INVITED CHAPTERS Purpose of the
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18 INVITED CHAPTERS do not recogniz
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20 INVITED CHAPTERS Research Proced
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24 INVITED CHAPTERS CONCLUSION This
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26 INVITED CHAPTERS Johnson, R. B.,
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Complexities in the Workload of Pri
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47 CRITICAL ISSUES IN SHARED LEADER
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Professional Learning Communities:
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Special Education Director Burnout
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Superintendent Decision-making and
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CRITICAL ISSUES IN CRITICAL ISSUES
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Administrative Functions The Admini
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The Administration of Special Educa
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The Effective Practices and Beliefs
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