Blazing New Trails - Connexions

346 CRITICAL ISSUES IN EDUCATION LEADERSHIP PREPARATION
crossed paths at the new faculty meetings that first year, learning about mutual colleagues and
where their work overlapped in the larger local community. The following year, they taught
down the hall from each other on Wednesday nights, one with his group of school
administrators in the Educational Leadership Master’s program and the other with her group
of early childhood and elementary teachers in the Early Childhood Master’s program. At
breaks during the long evening courses, they chatted about similar themes they were
exploring in their course content, such as educational cultures, system-building activities, and
models of leadership for institutional change.
The early childhood professor began to attend workshops organized by the educational
leadership professor through an Institute on Teacher Leadership. She was interested in how
the work in teacher leadership and school change was applicable to her research in early
childhood advocacy and leadership. It became apparent that only a few early childhood
educators attended these workshops and that most of the conversations were focused on K-12
education. From this unassuming beginning, the professors joined with colleagues from
various educational communities to continue to talk about how to more formally develop
opportunities for conversations between early childhood and K-12 educators.
Concurrent with these conversations, the early childhood professor and two doctoral
students who were also interested in early childhood leadership issues began discussing
possibilities for fieldwork that would support the students’ dissertation research. The
professor participated in various community early care and education groups and collaborated
with these groups to do research on early childhood leadership and components of quality
programs. Each of the doctoral students had a full time career and leadership role in early
childhood agencies in the local community. One of the doctoral students was an early
childhood consultant with the county Intermediate School District (ISD). In this role, she
facilitated meetings of early childhood program directors in the local school districts in the
county. She also provided on-site consultation for early childhood programs situated in local
districts. The other doctoral student was a project specialist for a local state-funded
collaborative that focused on early childhood system building. She facilitated task groups of
leaders representing a wide range of early childhood education, social service, mental health
and medical agencies in the county. An understanding of the local community guided the
conversations that the professor and students had both in terms of identifying issues that were
relevant to explore and study and in terms of which agencies and individuals would be key
stakeholders to support this exploration.
METHODOLOGY
Focusing the Results Conversation: Early Childhood Voices
In June, 2008, an Early Childhood Leadership Forum was co-hosted by the university,
the regional educational service agency’s department of early childhood education and
statewide public agencies for directors of early childhood programs in surrounding school
districts, representing tuition-based preschool and childcare, Head Start, and state funded
early childhood programs.
The focus of this leadership forum was to gain a better understanding of the needs of
these directors regarding their own leadership development, their roles as mentors of other
future leaders, and the kinds of opportunities they felt would be most beneficial to them in
terms of future leadership development.