Michele Acker-Hocevar

Voices from the field: What have we learned about instructional leadership?

Abstract This article documents perceptions of superintendents and principals when working under the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) in 2004–06. It uses data collected through the Voices 3 Project to consider three factors associated with instructional leadership as applied under NCLB, defining the schools mission, managing the instructional program, and promoting a positive school learning climate. Findings include that the narrowness of the curriculum objectives, the top-down hierarchical nature of decision making in the system, and the pervasively negative and punitive environment impact on the work of instructional leaders. The article argues that new approaches and leadership models are needed.

Viewing Faculty Governance within a Social Justice Framework: Struggles and Possibilities for Democratic Decision-Making in Higher Education

For many faculty members in colleges of education, social justice is a concept they teach or a lens that frames their scholarship about efforts to combat injustice in settings outside the university. Rarely does it serve as a lens for understanding or guiding the ordinary activities of faculty service, such as engagement in faculty governance. Yet the increasing corporatization of universities and its concomitant threats to academic communities as inclusive and democratic decision-making spheres necessitates the study of faculty governance within a critical social justice framework. This article, contextualized in a multi-campus college of education in a large, public university on the east coast of the US, addresses how leaders in faculty governance extended the principles of diversity and social justice taught in their classrooms to leadership practice and democratic decision-making within a college of education. Highlighted are practical strategies for increasing faculty voice and leadership listening and a critical reflection on the implications of the struggle for democratic decision-making within autocratic, corporatized organizational cultures.

Making Sense of Principal Leadership in Content Areas: The Case of Secondary Math and Science Instruction.

ABSTRACT We drew upon sense making and leadership content knowledge to explore how high school administrators’ understanding of content areas informed their leadership. We used math and science to illustrate our interpretations, noting that other content areas may pose different challenges. We found that principals’ limited understanding of these content areas prompted them to reframe challenges in ways that did not require them to possess content-area expertise. Principals relied upon their ability to hire classroom teachers and secure external professional development providers to improve instruction. We conclude the article by noting how the findings expand upon existing understandings of instructional leadership.

Florida’s Mandated Educational Leadership Program Redesign The William Cecil Golden Touch

In 2007, educational leadership programs in Florida were notified by Florida’s Department of Education of a law requiring all programs to align with new legislation, State Rule 6A-5.081. Previously, most state-approved preparation programs were based on Florida’s Leadership Preparation Standards, a version of the 1996 Interstate School Leadership Licensure Consortium (ISLLC) standards; the new law was based on 132 new skills and competencies that were not clearly linked to ISLLC. This article examines faculty response at one university to the mandate, the processes faculty used to redesign the program, and the composition and structure of the redesigned educational leadership preparation program.

Leadership in the implementation of innovations

Leadership in the implementation of innovations involves not only understanding the distinct constructs of leadership, implementation, and innovation, but it also requires a deeper understanding of their intersections. In this article, we have chosen an integrative approach focusing on the relationships among these three constructs. We begin first, however, with a brief review of the classical history and literature on planned change, diffusion, and implementation. We then have adopted a conceptual framework grounded in complex theories (see Maguire et al., 2006) as a lens for understanding the tensions across the three constructs, leadership, implementation, and innovation. In so doing, we emphasize the uniqueness of educational innovations which makes it possible then to study how societal and institutional barriers have continued to influence and constrain educational policies, theories, and practices. Our contribution ends with a critical overview of how educational leadership research, as it focuses on change and innovation, has progressed, beginning with the 1982 publication of Michael Fullan’s seminal text The Meaning of Educational Change. Fullan’s nine concluding themes identified deliberate choices available to educational leaders. Over a quarter century ago, Fullan concluded that educators “can no longer hide behind the excuse that worthwhile change in practice through deliberate means is impossible” (p. 297). He made very concrete suggestions for conceptualizing innovations and promoting professional development. Unfortunately, progress along each of these themes has not steadily advanced. Why not? We turned to Hargreaves and Fink’s (2004) findings on sustainable leadership in order to better understand the tensions among the constructs. In our concluding section, therefore, we offer our own critical comments regarding leadership, implementation, and innovations and the future research agenda on this important topic.

Understanding Role-Making in Leadership Performance

With high-stakes educational environment, principals need to reconceptualize their leadership in order to make their schools responsive, adaptive, and productive. This is a challenge for principals that have emerged from the ranks of the teaching ranks, typically learning their leadership frameworks by “taking” their role from previous principals and concepts of leadership they have experienced. The phenomenon of strict adherence to a predefined role is referred to as role-taking by Hart (Principal succession: establishing leadership in schools. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993) and because of today’s high-stakes environment, has become an out-of-date way of thinking about the leadership role because of its static view and disregard for reciprocal leadership grounded in a dynamic interaction between the students, teachers, central office, parents, and the community. This chapter explores how principals can shift their traditional role-taking processes to role-making processes that are performance-based, relational, reflective, contextual, and involve collaborative reciprocating engagement of constituents to adequately address the complexities of educational reform.

Adult Education Transition Programs: A Return to Community College Access

As community colleges face increasingly tight budgets and calls for a renewed focus on improving student outcomes in the form of graduation rates, colleges must address the concept of access. How much access to higher education can they continue to provide low-skilled students in adult education and similar programs? One way to ensure access to these students is through formalized transition to college programs. The authors summarize characteristics of two transition program models and introduce research at a community college that evaluated the effectiveness of three characteristics in the models.