Eleanor Drago-Severson

Cross-National Differences in Academic Achievement: Beyond Etic Conceptions of Children's Understandings

This article reviews theory and research on cross-national (Asian vs. American) differences in academic achievement, and shows that current research: (a) has made claims about achievement motivation with little regard for contemporary theory, and (b) has formed broad assumptions about the influence of culture, while paying cursory attention to the cultural contexts of learning. These difficulties cast doubt on the validity of the accumulated findings, and their practical application in the classroom. We argue that researchers need to integrate the social cognitive approach to achievement motivation–with its focus on beliefs about learning–with principles of cultural psychology–with their focus on culture and context. Further, we stress that qualitative methodologies, emphasizing meaning-making in context, can illuminate the deeper meanings that children and parents attach to school experiences. This will enable us to build grounded theory, and help us seek deeper understandings of similarities and differences within and across cultures.

School Leadership for Reducing Teacher Isolation: Drawing from the Well of Human Resources.

This qualitative study investigated how 25 school leaders in the US understand the practices they use to support teacher learning in their schools. The primary question guiding this research includes: How do these schools leaders, who serve in diverse school contexts with different levels of resources, exercise their leadership in support of adult learning? In this article, we consider the creative strategies these leaders employ to make use of human resources to reduce teacher isolation, which we understand as individuals brought into the school to provide rich contexts for teacher learning. We specifically examine the links between a school’s mission, atmosphere, and financial resources and its principal’s perceptions of human resource strategies (e.g. mentoring and teaming). We conclude that a school’s human resources, specifically mentoring and placing more adults in the classroom, provide opportunities for teacher learning by reducing isolation and building a more collegial environment. These strategies can contribute to the kinds of professional development a school may need.

Resisting Fragmentation Calling for a Holistic Approach to Professional Practice and Preparation for Educational Leaders

An online survey (using forced-choice and open-ended questions) of faculty at two university-situated degree-granting leadership preparation programs revealed that the faculty describe critical connections for developing leadership capacity: theory-practice nexus, university-based learning and “real-life” experience, and nurturing deeper faculty-to-student and faculty-to-faculty relationships. The faculty perceive that accreditation, certification, and licensure requirements have more influence over curriculum than legislative or local regulation; they voiced concerns about future impacts, although they did not identify current negative repercussions. The faculty reported doing reasonably well addressing contemporary domains of adult learning and development and social-emotional dimensions of leadership. Institutional supports are needed for furthering connections, holistic preparation, and practice.

A new approach for new demands: the promise of learning-oriented school leadership

In response to the complexity and mounting adaptive challenges of teaching, learning and leadership today, this article presents an overview of a new learning-oriented model of school leadership, which is composed of four pillar practices—teaming, mentoring, collegial inquiry, and providing leadership roles—that support internal capacity building or adult development. This model draws from more than 20 years of research with school leaders and educators around the globe. After first underscoring the need to find more effective ways to build human capacity to better equip educators of all kinds to manage the growing adaptive challenges they face in schools, we next orient readers to Kegan’ constructive-developmental theory, since it undergirds this model and the practices composing it. Third, we introduce each of the four pillar practices and discuss how they support capacity building in adults who make sense of their learning experiences in developmentally different ways. Last, we discuss key implications for implementing the model in different contexts. In particular, we highlight that: • A developmental perspective can help us understand that adults will experience professional learning opportunities, leadership experiences, and engagement in the pillar practices in qualitatively different ways. • A developmental vocabulary helps us move from labelling adults (e.g. as ‘resisters’) based on behaviours toward a deeper understanding of our differing developmental capacities and the need to differentiate professional learning opportunities to support adults’ growth. • Learning about and attending to supporting other people’s and our own growth (i.e. internal capacity building) can help us to enhance student achievement and build schools and systems that are better equipped to meet the complex challenges of leading and teaching our modern world.

Conceptual Changes in Aspiring School Leaders: Lessons from a University Classroom

Scholars and practitioners recognize the significance of improving leadership preparation programs. This longitudinal study (surveys and interviews) investigates how course structure and curricula supports graduate students’ learning about content as well as how to attend and facilitate adult development. This paper describes: (a) changes in students’ conceptions of how to support adult development, including their new understanding that adults need challenge and support to grow; (b) how course experiences helped them understand theory and practices for supporting adult growth, and (c) how they planned to use practices in their future leadership. This investigation offers insight into how course structure, content, and instruction can support educators’ leadership development.

Teaching, learning and leading in today’s complex world: reaching new heights with a developmental approach

‘What is happening in education today?’ and ‘What is most needed for the future of teaching, learning and leading?’ This article presents a developmental approach to learning, leadership and advancing professional learning—one that takes into account adults’ diverse meaning making processes—that can help educators build the internal capacities needed to meet the mounting challenges that define education today. The increasingly complex demands of our current world call for greater internal capacities that many adults do not yet have. To be more effectively equipped to teach, learn and lead in today’s world, we need to learn how to support each other’s growth and learning as well as our own, employ practices that support such growth and learn to collaborate and work together in teams in ways that help us to meet the implicit and explicit demands that we encounter every day in our work and that enable us to grow. In order for these to occur, we must create conditions that nurture such growth. This article helps us to do this by discussing the following: (1) Understanding that, as adults, we make meaning in qualitatively different ways; (2) Being mindful of the kinds of standards that can guide professional learning (all of which involve collaboration and teamwork); (3) Recognizing the need to differentiate the kinds of developmental supports and challenges that we offer to each other in order to support growth; and (4) Employing pillar practices (i.e. teaming, providing adults with leadership roles, inviting adults to engage in collegial inquiry and mentoring) with developmental intentionality so that we can grow internal capacities while engaging in these practices.

School Leadership in Support of Teachers' Learning: The Dramatic Differences that Financial Resources Make.

This article reports creative initiatives that 25 U.S. principals employed to support teacher learning in light of their financial resources. Nearly 90 hours of interviews with principals and 60 documents were coded to create narrative summaries and build profiles of how financial resources influenced how the school leaders supported teacher learning. All of the leaders worked creatively with the resources at hand to enhance teacher learning. Our research highlights that the best options are context specific and that shorter-term initiatives are insufficient. This report offers concrete examples, such as grantwriting and local partnerships, for working within financial constraints to support teacher learning.

In One Voice: Aspiring and Practicing School Leaders Embrace the Need for a More Integrated Approach to Leadership Preparation and Development

This article examines the views of graduate students who are aspiring or practicing school leaders and faculty from two university degree granting leadership preparation programs. Drawn from a larger mixed methods study, the authors focus here on survey results that show how these groups rated the effectiveness of 14 potential curricular dimensions drawn from traditional leadership content e.g., budget/finance, legal compliance and more recent contemporary additions to leadership curricula e.g., reflective practice, adult learning and development, social-emotional capacity. Both traditional and contemporary areas received high ratings for effectiveness and importance to professional growth and development. Implications of this research point to the joint importance and feasibility of a more integrated approach to leadership education that includes contemporary and traditional dimensions. These finding may have important implications for other settings as well.

Managing Adaptive Challenges Learning With Principals in Bermuda and Florida

We interviewed eight principals from Bermuda and Florida about how they identify and manage their most pressing challenges. Their challenges are composed of both adaptive and technical work, requiring leaders to learn to diagnose and manage them. Challenges focused on change and were traced to accountability contexts, yet accountability was not the driving force for all principals. Neither external demands nor principals themselves dictated whether the problem was technical or adaptive; instead, it was the nature of the problem itself. Leadership preparation programs are encouraged to provide a framework to address managing phases of adaptive, technical, and mixed challenges.

An Innovative International Community Engagement Approach: Story Circles as Catalysts for Transformative Learning.

The purpose of this article is to describe the successes and challenges of an innovative community engagement initiative in Bermuda, Education for All, in order to enlarge our understanding of how a community uses storytelling as a catalyst for transformative learning. Sponsored by the Coalition for Community Activism, community members and nonprofit groups united to facilitate an islandwide conversation about the student experience. They aspired to transform how people think about what constitutes an appropriate education and, ultimately, reframe the Bermuda conversation of schooling. We trace the evolution of the project attending to how adults came together around a shared purpose and vision for improving education. In so doing, we illuminate the complexities of using story as a catalyst for transformative learning. We provide a story circle protocol developed to gather stories of public school alumni. This story project for social change has implications for community leaders globally.