Leadership Development: The Larger Context

Developing individual school leaders is just a start. Meaningful gains in student achievement will require whole-system reform.

The common wisdom today is that school principals should be instructional leaders. But most principals face a major stumbling block—they don't know what instructional leadership means or how to do it. For school leaders to fulfill this role, leadership development needs to be job-embedded, organization-embedded, and system-embedded. Few leadership development programs currently meet the first of these successively rigorous criteria, and almost no programs meet the other two.

Job-Embedded Learning

Job-embedded school leadership development consists of cultivating, developing, and continuously supporting individual leaders in real, on-the-job settings. A 2009 study by Darling-Hammond, Meyerson, LaPointe, and Orr found that relatively few leadership development programs have strong job-embedded components. The study looked in-depth at eight exemplary programs¹  and found that they

• Explicitly recruit dynamic teachers and leaders into programs that focus on instructional and organizational transformation.
• Create a theoretically rich and practice-sensitive curriculum linking theory to practice.
• Wrap relevant coursework around field-based experiences organized so that candidates learn a coherent form of practice from expert leaders and instructors.
• Blend coaching that models and supports practice with analytic work that clarifies the basis for practice.
• Create cohorts of professionals who learn to collaborate and turn to one another for learning and resources.
• Secure the financial support and other material resources that allow candidates to spend significant time learning about practice in practice.