Leadership Preparation

The Wallace Foundation’s Knowledge Center on School Leadership released a report, Developing Effective Principals: What Kind of Learning Matters, synthesizing two decades of research on principal pre-service preparation and professional development. In this episode, we discuss the critical themes of the report with experts and practitioners, including lead author Linda Darling-Hammond, all of whom emphasize the importance of equity and diversity throughout principal preparation and how students, families, communities, and districts benefit when it’s centered.

Explore the unique skills needed for principals in rural and mixed districts in this episode of AACTE PRESENTS: Presents and Sustaining School Principals.  District leaders highlight their challenges, chief amongst them hiring and retaining trained principals.  Learn about successful programs preventing burnout, including an aspiring administrator initiative, gain insights from one superintendent’s experiences in a small rural district, and reflect on applications of principal pipeline research like the Wallace Foundation and Policy Study Associate’s Report: Planning and Developing Principal Pipelines: Approaches, Opportunities, and Challenges.  For resources related to principal pipelines, reference this episode’s show notes.

In the first episode, AACTE speaks with the lead author of the Wallace commissioned report, How Principals Affect Students and Schools: A Systematic Synthesis of Two Decades of Research. Released in February 2021, this report summarizes the connection between school leadership and school outcomes, as evidenced by research advances that haven’t been properly synthesized since 2004. Lead author, Jason Grissom, a Patricia and Rodes Hart Professor of Public Policy and Education at Vanderbilt University’s Peabody College, walks through the major landscape shifts in the past 20 years, with key insights into how preparation programs can be effective, equitable leaders.

AACTE speaks with lead author, Ellen Goldring, of the Wallace commissioned report released in April 2021, The Role of Assistant Principals: Evidence and Insights for Advancing School Leadership. In AACTE’s conversation with Goldring, she discusses how the role of AP has evolved, and therefore, how educator preparation professionals should evolve their training of them. The current climate expects principals to be superhuman if they are to be effective, which is why it is more important than ever to rethink how to position APs to drive student achievement and equitable school culture.

AACTE spoke with the Paul Manna, author of the Wallace commissioned report released in October 2021, How Can State Policy Support Local School Districts as They Develop Principal Pipelines?. Manna is an Isabelle and Jerome E. Hyman Distinguished University Professor and the director of public policy at William & Mary University. In this episode, he summarizes the state policy levers that can be pulled to improve principal pipelines and preparation programs and the extent to which they are effectively being used.

School leadership is second only to teaching among school-related factors in its impact on student learning, according to research. The Wallace Foundation’s Knowledge Center on School Leadership includes decades of research and institutional knowledge on the principalship, and with the ever present focus on improving schools in our country, the findings from its multi-year initiative to redesign principal preparation programs couldn’t be more timely. In this first episode, AACTE talks to Rochelle Herring, a senior program officer in education at The Wallace Foundation, with extensive experience working with school districts in various roles about they “why” behind investing in the principalship as an effective and strategic way to multiply positive student outcomes. Read the full report of the Launch of the University Principal Pipeline Initiative (UPPI) .

While the role of the principal remains essential, it has evolved over time. Throughout its evolvement, preparation programs, districts and state policy makers have worked in silos, creating gaps between the skills learned in an educator leadership program and what a principal actually does at their job. In this episode, we learn what the research says about what the gaps between “learning” and “doing” are and how to address them. Then we hear about how those findings are seen and implemented through the eyes of one of the University Principal Preparation Initiative’s project director, Tim Drake, an assistant professor of educational leadership and policy at NC State University. Drake completed his Ph.D. in education policy studies at Vanderbilt University, and he has an M.Ed. in international education policy and management from Vanderbilt and a B.A. in history teaching from Brigham Young University. He studies the policies and practices that influence the effectiveness of school leaders. Specifically, Drake works at the intersection of research, policy, and practice to inform the ways in which school leaders are trained and supported. His current research projects include educator data use, leadership preparation and development, early grades/pre-K leadership, and turnaround school leadership.

In our last episode, we dove into identifying the gaps between “learning” and “doing”, highlighting the work of University Principal Preparation Initiative.  We learned that through thoughtful planning using frameworks developed by Wallace to address the growing need for more collaboration between districts and universities.  In this episode, we’re going to dive into a case study of how one UPPI program at University of Connecticut and what they’ve learned from their program redesign. We spoke at length with Richard Gonzalez, who oversees the principalship and superintendency program at UConn and serves as the director of UConn’s UPPI initiative project, specifically about the redesign of their core assessments. Dr. Gonzalez and current program candidate Symone James, explain the core assessments, how they were tied to clinical practice and what that structure accomplished in closing the “learning” and “doing” gap of principal preparation.  

Principal Preparation Programs serve two major consumers, the candidate’s that enter their programs and the districts that hire them.  Therefore, it is essential to align program redesign efforts to district needs, which we have learned vary across the state.  Today we talk to Dr. Franciso Edobedo, Superintendent of the Chula Vista Elementary School District (CVESD), located in southern San Diego County, to learn what superintendents are looking for in principals and other school leaders entering the field, and again with Douglas Fisher, Ph.D., is Professor and Chair of Educational Leadership at San Diego State University, about why and how prep programs should work with districts like Dr. Escobedo’s.  Their collaboration led to various redesign improvements over the course of Wallace’s UPPI Initiative, but in this episode, we dive deeper into how they were able to share, evaluate and act on data through an equitable lens.

Dr. David Lorden and Dr. Alejandro Gonzalez Ojeda from San Diego State University share how principal preparation programs can restructure to meet the array of needs required by various districts.  They share insights from their own experiences as faculty during UPPI when it comes to diversifying the clinical experiences of candidates through collaborative redesign with the districts.

As the role of the principal evolves, so too does the extent to which they play the role of instructional leader. As a vital part of student outcomes and teacher retention in schools, it’s alarming that new principals often have skill gaps when providing instructional coaching. In the sixth episode of AACTE’s podcast covering the University Principal Preparation Initiative (UPPI), we discuss what the research says about instructional leadership, and how one UPPI program, Albany State, addressed the gaps in preparing their principal candidates to be effective at it.

We’ve talked a lot about the district’s role in preparing principles, but what is the state’s role? In this episode we speak with authors of Wallace commissioned reports covering state policy What levers can the states pull to support quality principal training, and why doing so is essential.