0.2 3. a paradigm shift in preparing instructional leaders revisited  (Page 3/9)

Through collaborative planning with the SBE and the Southern Regional Education Board (SREB), the Congress identified eight areas in which principals must be skilled. Those areas, later to become standards, were sub-divided into 96 knowledge and ability requirements that would serve as the foundation for revamped instructional leadership programs.

The governor appointed a liaison team to help post-secondary institutions understand what should be accomplished through program redesign and to oversee the process from inception to completion. The SBE offered $50,000 to four institutions that were willing to accelerate their redesign rate and serve as consultants to other colleges engaged in the process.

The College of Education at the USA was chosen as a lead institution by the SBE in 2005 and given 18 months to redesign its educational administration program. A review team from the Alabama State Department of Education (ALSDE) was scheduled to visit the USA campus in the fall of 2006 with authority to recommend program approval to the SBE at its next meeting. The visiting team was comprised of the governor’s liaison for leadership program redesign, a member of the SREB who had held principal and superintendent positions, the state’s Principal of the Year, and the ALSDE’s Director of Certification and Licensure.

Community collaboration

Initial planning at the USA centered on the ways and means of change rather than its end. The Dean of the College of Education encouraged instructional leadership program faculty to form a redesign team comprised of local superintendents and principals to identify specific issues inherent in creating a new program. The team quickly evolved into a Leadership Advisory Council. A Memorandum of Agreement (MOA) between local school districts and the USA that included tasks associated with Planning, Implementing, and Assessing a redesigned program became the Council’s signature work product.

The MOA served several purposes. First, it gave superintendents perspective about the redesign process and its goals. It also empowered local districts to participate in selecting students for the program. Third, the document included a provision for districts to pay for substitute teachers for residents who would complete a full-semester practicum in schools as their capstone experience under the supervision of an effective mentor principal. Identifying effective instructional leaders was a task for each district, but the agreed-upon criterion was that residents should practice leadership with the district’s best administrators, not those who needed extra help in the office.

Participants

The process of selecting applicants for the redesigned program was a departure from the USA’s tuition-driven, credit-hour production model. In its heyday during the late-1990s and early years of the 21 ^st century, more than 300 students had been enrolled in the educational administration program. Many of them, however, sought a Master’s Degree to gain a salary increase and had no intention of becoming school administrators.