Linda O'Neal, Ed.D.
SREB HIGHER EDUCATION NETWORK PROPOSAL
FROM APPALACHIAN STATE UNIVERSITY –Reich College of Education
To reformulate the MSA, Ed.S... and Ed.D. programs at Appalachian State University
In a way that:
§ gives our ASU students multiple opportunities to apply research based knowledge about higher student achievement and to solving field-based problems (this is top priority
§ more rigorously aligns program content with ISLLIC standards
§ incorporates the 13 characteristics of what successful school leaders need to know and be able to do from “Preparing a New Breed of School Principals: It’s Time for Action” by SREB
§ places greater emphasis on the knowledge and skills needed by school leaders to improve curriculum, instruction and student achievement
§ envisions the school leader as the chief learning officer
§ uses portfolio, problem based learning, virtual simulations and other performance based learning as criterion for success
§ incorporates assessment technology from National Association of Secondary School Principals and the Center for Creative Leadership
§ draws on successful alternative certification programs (i.e. Texas Alternative Certification for Administrators) so that Appalachian State University will have exemplary MSA, Ed.S.. and Ed.D. programs that will prepare school leaders who will make a difference in improving schools and student achievement.
We draw on the history of Appalachian State University and specifically the Reich College of Education’s (RCOE) history of adaptability and responsiveness to the field. We have the largest undergraduate education program in the NC university system. We have 2000 students, 90 faculty members and contribute 85% of Appalachian’s graduate credit.
Appalachian State University and the 8 counties we serve are members of the Appalachian Regional Commission (ARC). Their strategic plan includes goals on knowledgeable and skilled population and building regional capacity for leadership. The counties we serve average a poverty rate of approximately 20%. We believe that participation in this SREB initiative would be very compatible with the ARC mission of building regional capacity for leadership.
We
plan to include all three levels of leadership programs in our SREB initiative.
The Master of School Administration has embarked on the reformulation
process already. The North Carolina Principal Executive Program gave the North
Carolina Master’s of School Administration (MSA) institutions an opportunity
to examine curriculum alignment as a statewide group.
At Appalachian we assessed all our courses based on the same alignment
questionnaire that we had used at PEP. We
are modifying our courses predicated on this self- study.
We have also just revised our internship process and handbook.
The Educational Specialist Degree (Ed.S.) has just been reactivated and refocused on the Superintendent or Executive Cabinet Level. Effective fall, 2001 nine students are enrolled in this on-campus cohort.
The Doctoral Program in Educational Leadership (Ed.D.) is governed by a Program Policy Committee. There are multiple dissertations from that program area that relate to teaching and learning and support the tenets of the SREB proposal.
An advantage to these three programs (MSA, Ed.S. and Ed.D.) cooperating in this SREB initiative is the department’s practice of sharing faculty across program areas. Thus we communicate frequently about curriculum and instruction.
We also had our NCATE and Department of Public Instruction accreditation visits last year. The MSA, Ed.S. and Ed.D. programs successfully sustained those reviews.
The Masters of School Administration is one of the few programs in the Reich College of Education that receives its own line-item budget from the state. We currently offer an on-campus MSA program, a new on-campus Ed.S. cohort focused on the superintendent or the associate superintendent. In addition, we have two new off-campus MSA cohorts offered through our extension department. We serve western North Carolina and our extension programs are an important vehicle for serving our rural constituents who find it difficult to be full-time students and/or get to campus for coursework. Our mountain constituents depend upon these programs. The Dean has committed to explore the addition of one new faculty position through extension. All but about ten of our 110 students are part time
The State of North Carolina has a Principal’s Fellows Program (PFP) to ensure that the best, most highly qualified students are able to earn the MSA degree. PFP allows students to be full time students with a scholarship loan. We participate in this initiative and have PFP students each year.
Appalachian State University is a member of the North Carolina Information Highway (NCIH). In addition, we have computer support for the Reich College of Education and the university. There is a campus laptop initiative that teaches the use of web based courses (Web CT) and provides support to faculty. That technology department is larger than other comparable universities. That means faculty has significant support for technology development. This support allows us to be very innovative with delivery methods for the changes to the MSA, Ed.S. and Ed.D. programs.
We have a strong
history of involving practitioners in our programs. There is an ASU Public School Partners Program.
It covers 2000 square miles of predominately rural western NC, serves 8
surrounding districts and 105 schools. School
leaders from these local districts serve as adjunct faculty in our programs.
They add a deep knowledge base of current issues and enhance our
curriculum.
3.
In redesigning your school leadership preparation program, how have you
or will you draw staff from throughout the college of education, from across the
university and from exemplary practitioner for providing content knowledge, the
process skills and the experiential base to make the needed changes?
We are a partner with Principals’ Executive Program (PEP) whose mission is to provide high quality professional development for principals. Both PEP and ASU are focused on improving the knowledge, skills and dispositions of practicing and potential school leaders towards their central tasks of leading the instructional programs and managing the resources in their schools.
Our linkage with PEP gives us access to their experience, their modules and their practitioner knowledge. Last year, Appalachian hosted two PEP conferences for new principals and leadership students. One of those was on “ turn around schools”. Based on the successful design of those conferences, Ken Jenkins Executive Director of PEP has already asked us to share our design knowledge with other universities.
Anita Ware, Assistant Director for Principals Executive Program (PEP), has agreed to serve on our Advisory Board. She did her 1999 dissertation on “ turn around schools” as a doctoral student at Appalachian. She is very knowledgeable about the North Carolina schools that have achieved this distinction. She is already promised to do an institute for us this year about these schools. This will link us to the practitioners with a track record of success.
We have secured commitment for the SREB initiative from key ASU Curriculum and Instruction Faculty. Two of these key faculties are Ken McEwin and Tracy Smith. Ken McEwin currently is a member of the National Forum to Accelerate Middle Grades Reform. Sandra Cooney from SREB also serves on the Forum. He is a member of a subset of this group that has a web site on Schools to Watch that showcase turn around schools. He is co-author of THE EXEMPLARY HIGH SCHOOL (Harcourt Brace 2000).
Tracy Smith won the 2001 AACTE Dissertation of the year. She co-authored THE CERTIFICATION SYSTEM OF THE NATIONAL BOARD FOR PROFESSIONAL TEACHING STANDARDS: A CONSTRUCT AND CONSEQUENTIAL VALIDATION STUDY. She has deep knowledge of evaluation design.
4.
What changes have you made or are you planning to make in curriculum?
How have you or how will you provide the time for faculty teams to work
together to develop new curriculum regardless of who teaches a particular area?
We are partnering with PEP in this SREB initiative. We propose to re-define the notion of a partnership between a preparation program and a leadership academy. What ASU and PEP plan to do is establish a new process for fast-tracking potential candidates for school leadership positions from admission to the academic program to licensure. Here at ASU we intend to shift more program learning from course work to activities associated with practicum experiences supervised by accomplished principals. PEP will provide high quality activities and programs appropriate to the needs of the candidates, for which they will receive, academic credit towards their degrees and licensure. The fast-tracking part of this partnership is that a full time candidate, using this new configuration, can complete all licensure requirements in 12-15months, depending on previous experiences. The partnership with PEP is intended as a pilot. Once the program goes through one cycle, PEP will use the ASU pilot as a model for other state universities. This will create a network between a state leadership and the IHE’s charged with the responsibility of preparing school administrators. (see Attachment Two for a draft of the proposed partnership)
We are committed to significantly changing the way we prepare schools leaders. We envision a seamless continuum from pre-service to in-service. What our local school leaders do not know how to do is feedback to us about our preparation.
In “Preparing a New Breed of School Principals: It’s Time for Action” both National Association of Secondary Principals (NASSP) and the Center for Creative Leadership (CCL) are cited. Linda O’Neal, the advisory board leader has experience with both of these. She directed an NASSP Assessment Center in Texas and trained assessors across the country. She served as a member of a NASSP Think Tank on the state of the principalship. She was also on faculty at CCL prior to coming to ASU last year. While at CCL she wrote the CCL programs for educators that are being used in Georgia and South Carolina. These experiences allow Appalachian to design with those assessment technologies as a base. Examples of this include creation of simulations based on actual field experiences from our ASU students. These simulations are rich with examples of issues related to the leadership of teaching and learning. After the creation of these simulations, our ASU students are taught the assessor role. Then we use the simulations they created and their assessor skills to do peer reviews.
In addition, we will work with PEP to develop executive coaches who could work with our students. A key in leadership is who are you the leader. Parker Palmer in the Courage to Teach has clearly delineated that who you are is equally as important as your content knowledge and your skill set. Clearly there are three leadership components: 1 who is the leader 2. the leader’s knowledge base and 3 the leader’s skill set. They are interdependent and all are critical to fully realized leadership potential. The Center for Creative Leadership focuses on who is the leader component. With adding Executive Coaching for our students, we plan to help them develop this aspect of leadership.
The SREB links to curriculum development and national experts will greatly assist us in making the next steps. One key attribute will be thinking systematically about student achievement. We want a program that enhances what all role groups can do to help schools focus on teaching and learning. The principal is key in drawing in resources and support from key teacher leaders, central office, parents, businesses and other key stakeholders. Community School District 2, New York City Schools, Elaine Fink Superintendent have been working for 8 years using a nested learning communities concept. At the heart of the concept is the practice of how teachers were expected to learn from principals and professional developers and one another within their school; at the same time, principals were expected to learn from the superintendent, the deputy, and one another how to be better instructional leaders. Their work is described in “ Developing Principals As Instructional Leaders” by Elaine Fink and Lauren Resnick (Phi Delta Kappa, April 2001). We believe their work is seminal to the way we would like to build a committed support system for the principal.
The Dean has committed to seeking stipend money for teams to work on design in the interim between sessions and/or summer curriculum development. The doctoral program already provides a model for interdisciplinary efforts on curriculum development, since the program’s faculties are drawn from four departments within the college and several disciplines outside. Many of these faculties also teach courses for the MSA program.
5.
How have you or how will you work with local districts in the preparation
of a new breed of school leaders to create structured and problem-centered
field-based learning opportunities along with internships and mentoring?
As we build on our knowledge of assessment technologies, we plan to draw on the expertise of local administrators and MSA, Ed.S. and Ed.D. students to build case studies, in-baskets, leaderless group protocols and problem- based learning scenarios that reflect local issues. We will then teach the students to be assessors and use these active learning processes to run mini- assessment for development sessions. The development of simulations and teaching assessor skills was described earlier on question 3.
In our internship experiences, we have the students do an initial environmental scan and produce an analysis of the organization they will be entering. This puts them in direct contact with leaders in all levels of the organization. Additionally, it builds on their knowledge and sensitivity of organizational dynamics.
6.
What research have you done or do you plan to do to determine if your
leadership preparation program is producing leaders who can make a difference in
improving school curriculum, instruction and student achievement?
How will you support an ongoing research program aimed at continually
refining and revising your leadership preparation program for quality assurance?
We have research assistants through the Ed.D. program who can be involved in the evaluation component of our work. . As our process evolves we intend to use research assistants to help. There are also dissertation possibilities as part of our evaluation design.
Linda O’Neal just completed a seminar on Appreciative Inquiry (AI) and will use that technology as a part of our evaluation design. AI is defined as a collaborative and highly participative, system-wide approach to seeking, identifying, and enhancing the “life giving” forces that are present when a system is performing optimally in human, economic and organizational terms. The term appreciative comes from the idea that when something increases in value it “appreciates”. Therefore, AI focuses on the generative and life-giving forces in the system. We believe that school leaders can apply this lens to their teaching and learning issues and thus gain a deeper understanding of where and how they need to continue to improve.
7.
Explain how your institution collects data from your graduates and how
your process might change if you are involved in this project.
Currently the Cratis Williams Graduate School collects data about program satisfaction from both the graduate and the employer using follow up surveys. We solicit input from our Partner Schools about our graduates. There is also a new process under review that will produce a document called the MSA Report Card. The college also surveys graduates and employers as part of our NCATE on-going follow-up assessment plan.
We
are increasing our outreach to Appalachian graduates who are beginning
principals/superintendents. We will
offer cohort groups for these new administrators. In these groups we can continue coaching, doing problem-based
learning and focusing on teaching and learning and student achievement.
This will allow us to provide continuing support, as well as continue to
receive feedback and collect data about our program.
Dean Charles Duke, Ph.D.
Interim Chair of Leadership and Education Studies…L. Arthur Safer, Ph.D.
*Coordinator of Masters of School Administration and Educational Specialist Degrees… Linda O'Neal, Ed.D.
Principal Fellows Coordinator…Stephen White, D.A.
Masters of School Administration Faculty…Paul Smith, Ph.D. George Olson, Ph.D. and Ralph Hall, Ph.D.
Director of the Leadership Doctoral Program…Alice Naylor, Ph.D.
Representatives from the Curriculum and Instruction Department…Ken McEwin PhD., Sara Zimmerman, Ph.D., and Tracy Smith, Ph.D.
ASU Public School
Partners (Our 8 local school districts) Director…Linda McAllister, Ph.D.
Recent Graduate
who is already a principal…Melvin Fogg at Taylorsville and Terry Roper at
McDowell County
Director of Economic Development for Watauga County… Grant Wainscot
Representing Local Schools…Dee Petty, Ph.D.
Regional Leaders
Northwest
Regional Educational Service Agency (NWRESA)… Executive Director, Joe
Sinclair, Ph.D. (former superintendent)
Principal Executive Program (PEP)… Executive Director, Ken Jenkins, Ph.D.
Principal
Executive Program (PEP)… Assistant Director, Anita Ware, Ph.D.
Southwest
Educational Development Laboratory Program Manager for Increasing School
Success…Shirley Hord, Ph.D.
*Would serve as chair for this advisory board