Preparing Instructional Leaders

Significance

Impetus for developing a new model for leadership preparation comes from a sense of disjuncture between the call for instructional leadership in schools and the ways in which leadership preparation programs appear to be organized. Although national standards acknowledge some importance for instructional leadership (NPBEA, 2002, 2011) and some programs have been innovative in their responses to new challenges (Orr, 2006), evidence that instructional leadership is central to the purpose of leadership preparation is difficult to find. Our contention is that instructional leadership is pivotal to an aspiring leader’s ability to lead school improvement. Relegating it to a few standard elements (NPBEA, 2002, 2011) or making it an add-on to what already happens in programs is insufficient. Instructional leadership is most powerful when leaders learn alongside teachers (Robinson et al., 2008), but if candidates are inadequately prepared with respect to understanding teaching and learning, then they are not well equipped to engage in learning conversations with their teachers. The model presented in this article provides a path programs can take that applies strong preparation in management and leadership to leading instruction.

One reason for hesitation on the part of leadership preparation programs to fully emphasize instructional leadership up to this point may be ambiguity about the principal’s role with respect to instruction. Bridges noted this problem 45 years ago and it appears prevalent today:

On the one hand, the principal has been exhorted to exert instructional leadership, while on the other hand, he has been told flatly that such a role is beyond his or any other human being’s capacity. The problem with these disputations is that the exponents of a given position have neither defined sharply what is signified by the concept of instructional leadership nor made their assumptions explicit. (Bridges as quoted in Hallinger, 2011, p. 297)

More recently, Stein and Nelson (2003); Robinson et al. (2008) and many of the recent studies they use for their meta-analysis; City, Elmore, Fiarman, and Teitel (2009); and Hallinger (2011) are more explicit in what they mean by instructional leadership and clearly conclude that it is an essential role for principals. Therefore, instructional leadership skills, knowledge, and dispositions should be at the core of leadership preparation.

Leadership preparation programs have come under fire from critics at least since the mid- to late 1980s (Copland, 2000). They have been criticized in the past decade along several different dimensions that reduce to poor quality teaching; insufficient emphasis on specific topics of importance to prospective principals, particularly the ability to analyze data and use such analysis to help improve student performance; too much emphasis on theory and too little emphasis on practice or too little emphasis on theory and too much emphasis on practice; and a preoccupation with mundane management issues at the expense of leadership that would help to resolve intractable problems in challenging schools and districts (Hess & Kelly, 2005, 2007; Levine, 2005; Southern Regional Education Board, 2006). More recently, leadership preparation faculty have come to their own defense by publicizing steps programs have taken toward reform (Orr, 2006) and by learning how graduates perceive the value of the programs that prepared them, concluding that program quality matters (Orr & Orphanos, 2011).

Whether we believe the criticisms and the responses or not, the central problem for education leadership programs is that the context of leadership has changed over the past decade or two and if programs do not continue to change too, they will become irrelevant (Hale & Moorman, 2003). Instructional leadership has achieved new prominence in research, but there are varied definitions of instructional leadership and little discussion of leadership preparation pedagogy. Conceiving of programs as segmented courses, and leadership theory being divorced from classroom, school, and district issues (Leithwood et al., 2004; Robinson et al., 2008), confuses the direction programs might take to do a better job preparing instructional leaders. Constructing a model of leadership preparation that emphasizes instructional leadership provides guidelines for how preparation programs might respond to changing demands on school and district leaders and the persistent criticisms that programs are out of date and out of touch. The model presented in this article is a hypothesis about instructional leadership development that can be tested in field-based research about program effects on graduates. The model also provides a template that practicing leaders could use to determine the extent and nature of their own instructional leadership.

Guiding Questions

The development of this new model for leadership preparation is guided by a general question: How can preparation programs use what is known about instructional leadership to prepare candidates who can assist teachers in their schools to improve the quality of teaching and learning? More specific questions include:

• How might programs reconceive, rather than add on to or adjust, leadership preparation so that candidates emerge as well-prepared novices capable of leading instruction?

Working Definitions

To avoid misunderstanding of the model and its purpose, we define key terms that might otherwise be unclear and are central to the model. Additional terms will be introduced later in the article and explained at that time.

Management Tools

Education administration was defined by the administrative progressives in the early part of the 20th century as managing the school and district efficiently. With reverence for the factory model and scientific management, Ellwood P. Cubberley led the way toward professionalizing school management without a great deal of concern for defining leadership beyond improving efficiency (Murphy, 1992; Tyack, 1974). Some focus on management in leadership preparation certainly makes sense because working as a school or district administrator requires skills and knowledge that are not necessarily accessible to teachers from their on-the-job experience. Classroom teachers generally have little need to develop and control budgets, they do not typically evaluate their peers’ performance in formal ways, and their knowledge of education law is probably circumscribed by topics such as special education compliance, free speech in the classroom, and the need to report evidence of child abuse. Administrators, in contrast, are responsible for countless managerial tasks that have multiplied over the past 100 years such that they are driven to address managerial imperatives every day, all day long (Cuban, 1988). Consequently, the need for teachers who aspire to school and district administrative positions to learn management tools is obvious. For this article, management is defined as those activities that support the educational process but are not directly focused on curriculum or pedagogy.

In some ways, management tools are the easiest portion of the curriculum to teach. Candidates are eager to learn the rules that appear opaque to them coming out of classrooms, and instructors are able to convey a discrete set of knowledge, possibly enhanced by reminiscences of personal administrative experiences. Teaching management tools in this manner, however, may not be effective because it trivializes practices that are essential to leadership generally and instructional leadership specifically (Grissom & Loeb, 2011). Learning management is crucial to graduates being hired into and surviving in entry-level administrative positions, but taught in a segmented, isolated fashion and as an end in itself, management is not likely to help candidates improve teaching and learning once they are on the job. Management skills can greatly enhance school improvement efforts, but they must be integrated into graduate instruction that has instructional leadership as its ultimate goal.

One example of a fundamental management skill taught in most preparation programs and probed by Grissom and Loeb (2011) is nurturing faculty quality. Principals and assistant principals who aspire to improve instruction in their schools must pay close attention to how teachers engage students. They manage faculty quality through recruitment, induction, evaluation, retention, and release of teachers to create the best teaching corps for their schools—all behaviors emphasized in the Grissom and Loeb surveys. Hiring teachers with high potential, providing the professional development they need, and moving out those who cannot or will not develop are critical management behaviors that are part of and enable instructional leadership.

Figure 1 displays management tools as a foundation upon which instructional leadership rests. Management effectiveness is closely related to school improvement (Grissom & Loeb, 2011). If management tools are taught in a manner that demonstrates how they make instructional leadership possible and more effective, then they take on a whole new meaning compared to merely “learning the ropes.” More will be said about this in the discussion of problem-based learning.

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Figure 1.

Relationship between instructional leadership and management tools

Leadership and Organizational Theory

Leadership is most often perceived in very practical terms. Yet, leaders carry in their heads theories about how the organizations they lead work, even if they are unable to make these explicit. Bridges worked to marry together leadership theory, organizational theory, and practice when he based the Stanford Principal Preparation Program in problem-based learning pedagogy. He did so having conducted market research suggesting that potential students were not interested in social science–based theory, but rather the practice of instructional leadership.

Administrators make decisions. I have to create a learning environment in which they [the students] make the decisions. Then it just kind of evolved into I can combine teaching managerial skills—and they can practice those managerial skills—as they’ll work on messy problems that they’ll confront in the principalship. What I’ll do is identify relevant research and writings that are pertinent to those problems, but it will be up to them to figure out how they can and if they can take that input and apply it to these problems. (Bridges interview, October 29, 2010)

Our interpretation of Bridges’s basic strategy is that he provided opportunities for students to learn new theories and work with empirical evidence to guide their decision making as they solved real-world problems. We return to problem-based learning later in the article, but elaborate on the role of leadership and organizational theory in this section.

Learning some amount of theory as part of leadership preparation is universally agreed upon, even if there are differences about which theories ought to be emphasized (Hess & Kelly, 2007). Leading a complex organization is an uncertain endeavor that can be explained, at least in part, by leadership theory. Motivating others to do work they might not do without external stimulation is the core responsibility of those who aspire to lead. In many leadership preparation programs, the range of leadership theory appears to be narrowed to transformational leadership as a fundamental strategy (Burns, 1978; Leithwood & Jantzi, 2008; Marks & Printy, 2003; Robinson et al., 2008), change leadership as a necessary response to the changing educational context (Fullan, 2001; Schlechty, 2001), and instructional leadership as a means to turning principals’ and superintendents’ attention to the classroom (Leithwood et al., 2004; Robinson et al., 2008). Each of these theoretical themes is based in a rich literature that can be organized for the aspiring leader into categories or frames that emphasize the ways in which leaders understand organizational structure, human interrelationships, organizational politics, and symbolism (Bolman & Deal, 2008).

Organizational theory reveals school and district characteristics both typical of and different from other organization categories such as private enterprise, nonprofit entities, or government (Bush, 2011). It brings candidates out of a perspective of individual classrooms governed by teachers acting independently into realizing that schools function as complex organizations nested in larger organizations, namely, school districts, which are impacted by state and federal governments. Seeing schools as organizations makes sense of many of the nonrational outcomes that stem from competing goals, the limited ability of individuals to know how to solve immediate problems, and conflicting desires to acquire resources. Leaders who understand schools as organizations learn their roles and responsibilities within them and the opportunities and limitations created by organizing education into a multilayered, multifaceted effort to convey skills, knowledge, and dispositions to children. They also know how to approach changing the organizations they lead.

Another relevant theoretical field that stands apart from understanding leadership and organizations is organizational learning. Two basic camps are important for prospective leaders. Levitt and March (1988) argue that learning takes place through the enactment of routines. Argyris and Schon (1974), on the other hand, view organizational learning as more active and amenable to leadership behaviors. Both schools of thought are instructive to prospective leaders regarding how to make change in schools and thus potentially improve student performance and are exemplary of the kind of theory that bridges well to leadership practice.

The various theories touched on here provide working hypotheses that guide leaders through ambiguous and uncertain circumstances. At the same time, leaders test what they experience against the theories they know in search of explanations that guide next steps. The result is a process of testing and adapting theories that may be thought of as theories in use (Argyris & Schon, 1974), theories of action (City et al., 2009), or sensemaking (Weick, 1995).

Leadership and organizational theory explain, in part, how educational leaders might apply management tools to address situations that are initially unfamiliar and inherently puzzling to them. This is particularly true when leaders attempt to make change, a critical leadership behavior (Cuban, 1988; Fullan, 2001; Leithwood et al., 2004; Leithwood & Jantzi, 2008; Schlechty, 2001). Resistance to change is well documented (e.g., Argyris & Schon, 1974; Lewin, 1947; Weisbord, 2004), yet overcoming such resistance requires strategies that may not be clear because the nature of resistance is unique to individual circumstances. Program candidates would be well served to use what they know about leadership and organizational theory as a guide or roadmap for the leadership choices they make. In turn, their experiences with improvement efforts inform their understanding of the usefulness of those theories. The ways in which leaders effect change is shaped by the knowledge they have created by combining theory and experience. Figure 2 displays these dynamics.

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Figure 2.

How leadership and organizational theory interact with instructional leadership

Pedagogical Content Knowledge

Pedagogical content knowledge (PCK) helps to frame a set of insights that the well-prepared novice administrator ought to have in order to engage in instructional leadership, a role that fundamentally focuses on teaching and learning. Shulman explained in his interviews how he came to identify PCK as central to teaching and how he coined the phrase. He describes the challenging puzzle he identified as he carried out research investigating how teachers decide what to teach to their students and how to teach it.

I began thinking that, “Ok, I’ve got to focus on what makes teaching an unusual profession [and] . . . why being a history teacher is different from both being an historian and being a teacher writ large.” It was that intersection that I called pedagogical content knowledge. What a horrible phrase! So, we began to do research on the question of how does somebody who already knows something learn to teach what they know to somebody else who doesn’t. That was the formulation. And then it got more nuanced because people don’t either know or not know something. It got more nuanced into . . . how does somebody who already knows something at some level and in some manner figure out how to teach it to somebody else? [Somebody] who either doesn’t know it or already has some pieces of it in some fashion or in some manner. So you begin to complexify the question of teaching, but it’s complexified around the intersection of teaching and content. (Shulman interview, June 10, 2010)

The intersection between content and pedagogy adds a critical dimension to the instructional leadership challenge. Not only do candidates need to broaden their knowledge of content, they must also expand their understanding of pedagogy, and this expansion should happen along at least two dimensions. First, teaching history is different from teaching math. Second, educators must be cognizant of the student audience both collectively and individually in order to know how to combine content and pedagogy in a manner that reaches that audience. In his interview, Shulman emphasized the importance of school reform (an activity that involves school leaders as foot soldiers and which we elaborate in the Context subsection) taking into account the teacher, content, and the student. If one of those elements is not considered, then a reform effort is not likely to make sense.

There’s a teacher, whether that teacher is one single human being or if you think of it as a faculty. And then there is somebody learning. Therefore, any time somebody comes up with a great school reform idea, the first question you should be asking, you should be laying that critical and analytical template on top of it and saying, . . . What counts as the subject matter? Or do they have a kind of watered-down . . . view of what it is that’s being taught? Is everything all about context? School re-organization, decentralization, whatever it is, losing sight of what are you supposed to be teaching here [content], of who the teachers are? Whether they have either the capacity, the interest, the opportunity to learn. The learner [students]? What about all the developmental differences, the linguistic differences? (Shulman interview, April 18, 2010)

By bringing the characteristics of students into the PCK equation, Shulman provides a pathway into diversity. Knowing how to teach particular content to a specific group of students means understanding the ways in which their experiences may differ from the majority population. Leadership preparation programs must address diversity with their candidates along two different dimensions: (a) the candidates’ own knowledge, skills, and dispositions with respect to diversity (Horsford, Grosland, & Gunn, 2011) and (b) candidates’ abilities to create culturally proficient schools (Lindsey, Roberts, & CampbellJones, 2005). The fact that students come to schools with a wide variety of cultural, socioeconomic, language, and learning backgrounds means that recognizing who the learners are is a complex task. Understanding the diversity of student bodies and finding ways to make all students welcome in schools is made more urgent by the fact that the typical prospective leader has little or no direct knowledge of the roadblocks faced by underrepresented segments of the student population (Beachum, 2011).

To help improve student achievement by enhancing teacher learning and action, aspiring leaders require an understanding of content, pedagogy, and a given student population. Yet, contemporary advocates of instructional leadership focus almost entirely on what leaders should do and very little on what they should know (Stein & Nelson, 2003). Thus, an important step in instructional leadership development may be overlooked. Most aspiring school and district leaders have spent at least a portion of their careers in the classroom, giving them some firsthand knowledge of the intersection between content and pedagogy. Considering schools as complex organizations suggests, however, that any given teacher’s knowledge is limited because teaching occurred in one or a few segments of the organization. Elementary school teachers, for example, are likely to have taught in younger grades (K–2) or older grades (3–5), but perhaps not in both. More sophisticated provision of services to students with special needs over the years has further complicated the situation by creating categories of teachers who work primarily in the general education classroom and those who work primarily outside and/or in support of it. Each type of teacher comes to leadership preparation with a different set of pedagogical content knowledge.

Perspectives proliferate in secondary schools because of their greater size and further specialization. A teacher with a 15-year career in social studies may understand only a small portion of the instructional and management issues associated with teaching physical education. Likewise, teachers who come from non-“core” subjects such as fine arts or foreign language may have only vicarious knowledge of state standards in the core subject areas, stress on teachers and students caused by state assessments, and efforts to help struggling students meet minimum required achievement levels. Add to this mix of perspectives specialists such as counselors, social workers, and second language acquisition teachers and it becomes obvious that candidates from secondary schools enter preparation programs with narrower conceptions of teaching and learning than do their elementary counterparts.

Stein and Nelson (2003) acknowledge the problem of principals understanding a narrow band of the curriculum and how this hampers their instructional leadership efforts. They argue that school and district administrators must be subject matter experts in at least one area, but only one is disadvantageous, if not inadequate. If they aspire to be instructional leaders, then they need expertise in multiple areas. Stein and Nelson resolve this problem in part with the recommendation that administrators expand their pedagogical content knowledge through a process they refer to as “postholing.”

We suggest that administrators need substantial experiences of some depth in every subject, in which they experience what it is like to be a learner of that subject, in which they study what is known about how children learn that subject and become familiar with the best instructional methods for that particular subject. . . . We are not arguing that administrators need equally broad and deep knowledge of every subject. (p. 443)

They also reference opportunities for expanded instructional leadership by distributing leadership to subject matter experts (e.g., teachers) throughout the school and the system.

We agree with Stein and Nelson (2003) in principle that postholing and distributed leadership may enhance instructional leadership. But we also believe they do not take pedagogical content knowledge development for prospective leaders far enough. City et al. (2009) set a high bar of expertise as they advocate for administrators to engage meaningfully in networks of instructional leaders who are able to discern high-quality teaching and provide the teacher capacity development necessary to achieve it. Our model addresses the need for leaders savvy about teaching and learning identified by City et al. and Robinson et al. (2008) by expanding on the Stein and Nelson argument and imagining prospective administrators becoming conversant in several content areas—perhaps more deeply than postholing suggests—and expanding their capacity to work productively with diverse populations. Candidates must be able to have meaningful discussions about instruction for all students with the experts—namely, classroom teachers—and have a clear idea about how and to whom leadership might be usefully distributed.

The main challenge for leadership preparation programs is to figure out how much PCK in a range of areas is adequate for instructional leadership. We have not yet been able to specify the ideal mix of PCK and will likely need several years of experience in a redesigned program to figure that out. We are not alone in our struggle to identify the required breadth and depth of prospective school leaders’ pedagogical content knowledge. Stein and Nelson (2003) opt for administrators knowing strong instruction when they see it. Such an idea links to educational connoisseurship and educational criticism, our next step in the model, but is not especially concrete. The ability to know good instruction when one sees it derives from expanding one’s PCK—more is better, but good enough is difficult to know.

A problem for leadership preparation programs is that understanding the teacher, content, and students is typically divided into separate courses on instructional supervision and curriculum, the latter tending to be based in operationalizing curriculum standards and possibly learning some curriculum theory. The students, as critical as they may be to Shulman’s conception of school reform and improvement, may only be considered in very general or abstract ways in many courses. Students and, to a lesser extent, the school community are likely to be seen as part of the context of leadership rather than central to it, but a careful reckoning of who students are and the nature of their learning needs and challenges may be somewhat rarer.

Pedagogical content knowledge is what the instructional leader leads from, it is the stuff of his or her coaching, advising, or sharing with other teachers. Leaders’ pedagogical content knowledge (what Stein and Neslon, 2003, refer to as leadership content knowledge) informs the conversations they have with teachers, the resources they provide, and the assessments of teaching and learning they make. The pedagogical content knowledge that suffuses the instructional leader’s thinking is represented in Figure 3 as a shaded oval inside the Instructional Leadership box to convey that it is developed by the aspiring leader and becomes a part of him or her. This is in contrast to management tools or theories that are external to the individual.

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Figure 3.

Pedagogical content knowledge as an internal element of instructional leadership

City et al. (2009) provide additional support for the centrality of PCK by making the point that the instructional core is “composed of the teacher and the student in the presence of content” (p. 22), literally the interaction among these factors. They derive from this framework a set of principles that guide how to improve the quality of student learning. Among these are the notion that “increases in student learning occur only as a consequence of improvements in the level of content, teachers’ knowledge and skill, and student engagement” (p. 24). We argue that it is the instructional leader’s job to facilitate such improvements in teachers’ capacities to teach. Therefore, it is not sufficient that leadership preparation graduates know about the intersection among teachers, content, and students, they must also understand how to foster deeper pedagogical content knowledge among teachers so that they become better equipped to address the teaching and learning challenges they face on a daily basis. To engage in such capacity building requires a clear understanding of what teachers know, where their own learning gaps are, and how adults learn so that leadership graduates are capable of helping teachers to expand their pedagogical content knowledge (Stein & Nelson, 2003). And there is an additional important requirement: Change implemented school wide requires leaders to promote organizational learning that alters the rules and values that held the status quo in place (Argyris & Schon, 1974; City et al., 2009). The next building block of this model provides a set of skills and a mechanism that helps leaders engender teacher learning and organizational learning based on pedagogical content knowledge.

Educational Connoisseurship and Criticism

A leader with highly developed pedagogical content knowledge has a strong perspective from which to become a connoisseur of teaching and learning. Connoisseurship broadens and deepens pedagogical content knowledge because it requires a comprehensive understanding of teaching and learning as it unfolds. Eisner explained in his interview that to appreciate the classroom deeply—to lead instruction by fostering extensive pedagogical content knowledge—requires a connoisseur’s perspective. Although educational connoisseurship as a concept is not new, in the current context of accountability it is revolutionary.

Thinking about teaching and learning from the perspective of test scores, check lists, and classroom walk-throughs alone atomizes the instructional process to such a degree that observers (teachers and/or administrators) merely recognize rather than perceive or understand what is happening in classrooms (Eisner, 1998). Quantitative data intended to help leaders understand the state of instruction serve the managerial imperative (Cuban, 1988) because collecting them is efficient, but doing so is not sufficient for instructional leadership. Eisner advocates that educators see the whole classroom experience, and feel and hear it as well, to understand its qualities thoroughly. Similar to the connoisseur who grasps the overall effect of a play or novel and how that effect is generated, the educational connoisseur comprehends on a deep level both the specifics of what students and their teacher are doing and what their activity means to them individually and collectively. The true connoisseur is open to varied paths to excellence, rather than restricted by a predetermined set of “look-fors.”

The varieties of excellence [in teaching] are numerous, and they relate to differences in form, and to differences with respect to what is valued. Different conceptions of educational virtue lead to different conceptions of virtuous teaching. Further, who is being taught counts in judging how well someone is teaching. (Eisner, 1998, p. 70)

A prospective administrator who presumes to lead instruction must be a connoisseur of instruction. To see the classroom in its entirety means understanding what is happening in terms of the teacher, the student, and the content and how well they are fitting together. Thus, instructional leaders apply and expand their pedagogical content knowledge as they develop a connoisseur’s ability to see much or all that is happening in the classroom. An important purpose of developing the connoisseur’s perspective is to assist teachers to develop and expand powerful pedagogy specific to the content they teach and to become connoisseurs in their own right.

In their effort to develop a defined educational practice, City et al. (2009) advocate for networks of administrators to engage in careful observations of classrooms and schools in a manner consistent with connoisseurship. Although their target is superintendents working on their systems, many of the core ideas can be applied to preparing school site leaders. The critical point is that they agree with Eisner that knowing in depth what occurs between teachers and their students requires a focus on teaching and learning that is more than merely recognizing specific behaviors or activities. Their use of the term educational practice means sophisticated and effective ways of teaching all students, regardless of circumstances. Their mechanism of educational rounds provides an avenue to develop and exercise educational connoisseurship.

Strongly implied, though not yet stated, is the idea that merely knowing about the classroom is inadequate. Instructional leaders—and teachers generally, for that matter—must be able to communicate what they know. Eisner cites Dewey as developing the idea of educational criticism, but he elaborates. The following quotations combine Eisner’s thinking as presented in The Enlightened Eye and our interview:

The aim of criticism is the re-education of the work of art. People come to a situation, whether a human interaction or an object and they try to see it, experience it. How much they see depends on their level of connoisseurship. But once they see whatever it is that they see, then the problem—if they’re going to use it educationally—is to write about or talk about or communicate what’s there through language. (Eisner interview, April 18, 2010)

Effective criticism functions as a midwife to perception. It helps it come into being, then later refines it and helps it become more acute. Both connoisseurship and criticism are applicable to social and educational phenomena as well as to the world of art. They can be applied to schools, classrooms, and teaching, and to the perception and analysis of instructional resources. (Eisner, 1998, p. 6)

Learning how to be an instructional leader involves becoming an effective educational connoisseur and critic. It means learning to appreciate teaching and learning across a broad spectrum, to convey that knowledge to others, and to understand others’ perspectives in turn. Programs that choose to teach prospective leaders to engage in educational connoisseurship and criticism also need to teach how to engage others in those processes because instructional improvement will be greatly enhanced by teachers’ abilities to understand their peers’ and their own classrooms and communicate what they know. Educational criticism combined with connoisseurship opens the door to both the development of educational practice through instructional rounds (City et al., 2009) and organizational learning (Argyris & Schon, 1974).

Figure 4 adds educational connoisseurship and criticism to the model for instructional leadership and conveys the notion of leadership for school improvement as the primary reason for leading instruction.

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Figure 4.

The contribution of educational connoisseurship and educational criticism and leadership for school improvement as the ultimate outcome

Context

Leadership for school improvement occurs within a specific context. Furthermore, that context is likely to be layered. Classrooms, schools, and districts all have separate, overlapping, and nested contexts, and education leadership programs exist in a related yet separate context of their own. Therefore, leadership preparation programs have a responsibility to teach about the context in which school improvement efforts happen. Cuban offers guidance for thinking about the context of teaching, which is crucial to school improvement efforts.

A central characteristic of the U.S. public education context is ongoing calls for education reform (Cuban, 1990, 2010). Some of the reform fervor undoubtedly stems from the democratic and political nature of public education. School board candidates, mayors, governors, and presidents are fond of proclaiming that an education crisis exists. The need to “fix” education justifies (re)election to public office. But motivation to reform education runs deeper.

Cuban’s research about how teachers taught has led him to conclude that the reform impulse originates with the birth of universal public education in this country.

Efforts have been made to try to improve schools since the very beginning of schools. The first reformers were really the people who set up public schools because they wanted to reform society and they wanted to make society better. They wanted to make democracy stronger. They wanted to make people informed, to read the Bible at the very beginning of public schools. . . . [T]eaching, learning, and reform are at the very heart of the enterprise called public schooling. (Cuban interview, April 16, 2010)

Cuban’s assessment of the reform climate from more than 20 years ago sounds familiar today.

It comes as no surprise, then, that the centuries-old traditions about the forms of teaching that are embedded in different values about knowledge and its relationship to teachers and students would have generated tensions about what content should be taught in schools. We are now in the full flush of state-driven reforms that aim for a common core of academic knowledge. We hear that 17-year-olds can’t figure out math problems, locate Siberia, or tell the difference between the Bill of Rights and a bill of sale. Higher graduation requirements now mandate that all students take more academic subjects. Yet this passion for a core of subject matter shared by all would be familiar to Horace Mann and other mid-19th-century school reformers who introduced the common school curriculum in the first eight grades. (Cuban, 1990, p. 4)

Despite the long history of reform in the United States, penetration to the classroom level is limited and sporadic. This fact is crucial to considerations of instructional leadership, which by definition is focused on what happens in the classroom. Understanding the sources of resilience at the classroom level is important to leaders who aspire to improve teaching and learning and to the programs that prepare them. Over the years, Cuban has used a few metaphors to describe the durable nature of teaching practices. The two that we find most vivid are the hurricane (Cuban, 1993) and the peat bog (Cuban, 2010). The hurricane metaphor describes reform efforts as storm-force winds whipping the surface of the ocean into huge waves while the lower depths are classrooms calm and oblivious to all the noise and furor occurring far away. The peat bog metaphor stems from the phenomenon of education reforms being layered on top of one another while educators and policymakers forget about what lies beneath the surface.

In both bogs and cities, the past is too often ignored until fires and cadavers appear. In urban school systems, layers upon layers of historical events, including school reforms, are compressed into social, political, and organizational patterns that inescapably influence current actions—yet those effects may be unseen, like buried bodies and underground fires. (Cuban, 2010, p. 2)

Leadership preparation programs should find ways to guide candidates through the peat bog that characterizes the systems in which they will work. Two problems make doing so a substantial challenge: (a) There is no mention of U.S. public education history in the Educational Leadership Constituents Council standards, and it is therefore an unlikely component of most preparation programs, and (b) candidates from large districts tend to have little understanding of their local history because of the isolated nature of their teaching work and/or because of their relatively brief experience in public education. A candidate who entered teaching fewer than 10 years ago only knows the classroom in the context of an emphasis on meeting state standards and achieving minimum passing levels on state assessments—the post-NCLB world—and may know nothing of previous reform efforts such as implementation of authentic assessments and site-based management. Yet, those two examples of reform are embedded in the peat bog and may be seen as related to efforts to create common assessments across classrooms and participation in work groups commonly referred to as professional learning communities.

Student diversity emerges as an important part of the context of schooling after the Brown decision and through the growth of interest groups in the latter part of the 20th century (Tyack, 1974). The hurdles and roadblocks faced by students not in the majority are likely difficult for many teachers and prospective administrators to see because their own life experiences may not help them to understand how contextual factors inhibit student progress (Beachum, 2011). Steele (2010) has named identity and stereotype threat and contextual contingencies as important factors that students of color, students in poverty, second language learners, females, and students with disabilities are likely to face in schools. Leadership preparation candidates require opportunities to learn how the context may threaten students in a diverse population in different ways. Steele’s analysis helps to explain why, despite some attention paid to diversity, challenges such as NCLB subgroups achieving adequate yearly progress persist. Cuban elaborates with an historical perspective that explains why reforms have such a difficult time taking root.

District influences, particularly those of the superintendent and school board, are additional critical contextual factors that affect major reforms. Yet, even under the most supportive conditions for reform, no more than 25% of classrooms in a particular district clearly exhibit evidence of an intended reform. When reforms are promoted, teachers have a strong tendency to hybridize them with their previous teaching practices. An important lesson from Cuban is that instructional leadership will not prevail through coercion or simply because it is the right thing to do. Rather, a component of instructional leadership must be an ability to know what is meant by quality instruction, an understanding of the local context, and the realization that no one fully controls outcomes. Quotations from an interview with Cuban and from How Teachers Taught explain this perspective.

[I]f you really want teachers to . . . change their instruction from A to B, you had better know what A is and B is and that there are strengths and weaknesses to each A and B. There is a history there and you need to be more informed about those traditions of teaching. (Cuban interview, April 16, 2010)

The initial impulse for reform most often (but not always) comes from outside the schools; the impulse is converted into a shared and politically acceptable definition of what the problem is and how schools and teachers can solve the problem; the policies and programs that get adopted are partially implemented as they unevenly and erratically travel through the different levels of schooling (state, district, school, and classroom); and, finally, the institution of schooling, with its varied levels, bends reforms to its purposes. The journey from policy talk at the national and state levels to what occurs in schools and classrooms is long, some road markers are missing, and the unpredictability of the weather makes arrival at the destination uncertain. (Cuban, 1993, p. 245)

The point is that instructional leadership means more than applying the latest “best practice” without considering the context from which it was derived and the different context in which it is to be applied. A well-prepared instructional leader would be able to read the local context—to understand the waves of reform, the nature of teacher resistance to change, and the potential that exists in the tendency for teachers to hybridize reforms—and to make decisions accordingly. Internships, opportunities for reflection, and classroom experiences that build from what candidates might have learned from school improvement efforts and other in-school encounters give preparation programs the opportunity to work with candidates on their abilities to respond to and shape their school and district contexts.

Instructional leaders who understand the local, state, and national contexts that influence implementation of their own school improvement efforts may be better able to anticipate teacher resistance and take advantage of hybridizing tendencies. Instead of seeing their improvement plans as cast in stone, they will understand that improvement evolves and responds to pressure—both to make change and to resist it. Understanding context more clearly will help leaders to work with the forces of change and resistance rather than against them.

Figure 5 wraps the graphic depiction of the leadership preparation model in context to communicate the idea that leadership and change do not take place isolated from influences outside the classroom and school.

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Figure 5.

The importance of context

Problem-Based Learning

Teaching about instructional leadership in a manner informed by Shulman, Eisner, and Cuban holds great promise, but knowledge about leadership alone does not give one the ability to lead. Inherent dispositions aside, leadership development requires the application of knowledge—management skills, organizational theory, pedagogical content knowledge, educational connoisseurship and criticism, and the context of teaching and learning. Most candidates need opportunities to practice leadership to learn the extent to which they have the skills necessary to manage day-to-day processes, work collaboratively, solve problems, make decisions, and motivate others. Problem-based learning (PBL), in contrast to more traditional teaching, provides the prospect of learning and expanding on one’s leadership capacity by practicing skills in a protected, safe setting in close proximity to the professor. Rooted in Dewey’s conception of experiential learning and consistent with Argyris and Schon’s (1974) contention that nothing is truly learned until it is enacted, PBL is an appropriately complex teaching and learning strategy that aligns with the subtlety and intricacy of instructional leadership.

In the principal preparation program Bridges created and ran for over 10 years, he employed what he calls problem-stimulated learning (Bridges, 1992). A key component of PBL for Bridges was that candidates had to make their own decisions. The quotation from Bridges in the Leadership and Organizational Theory section makes this clear.

By emphasizing work on messy problems, Bridges stresses candidates learning from leading, rather than from being taught about leadership. Stemhagen et al. (2011) emphatically argue that such a method is most appropriate for leadership preparation:

[I]nstead of focusing primarily on how each student is internalizing the subject matter, educators should be more concerned with how students interact with the situations they encounter as well as to how they interact with other students. This shift is seismic; evaluation of an individual’s knowledge “intake” misses the point. The action is in how students know in relation to the problems at hand and to their fellow students. (p. 3)

Learning experiences in PBL are balanced between program structure and candidate discretion. The problem candidates work on is given, along with learning objectives and source material that can be employed to help address the problem. Previously learned skills and knowledge are brought to bear on the problem given. Professorial control is greatly relaxed when candidates work in small groups to come up with a solution that is communicated via administrator (as opposed to graduate school) type documents and oral presentations. Students make decisions about how they will organize their work, who will play which roles for the work and the presentations, and what the final products will be. Bridges employs three important tools that enhance students’ learning experiences: (a) Presentations are made to practicing leaders (school board members, superintendents, and others), (b) the professor provides timely feedback regarding processes and outcomes that result from PBL experiences, and (c) students reflect on their learning through individual essays.

Additional authenticity may be attributed to the PBL classroom when the characteristics of small group participants are considered. Imagine working on a problem such as how to develop a greater sense of community for ninth-grade students. One member of the group is selected to lead. Who is she leading? Typically, teachers who have varying levels of pedagogical content knowledge, focused in a range of disciplines, across multiple grade levels. The leader’s management skills, application of organizational and leadership theory, pedagogical content knowledge, and educational connoisseurship would be challenged as she works with the group of teachers to create plans that cut across subject areas for the desired effect throughout the ninth grade.

The role of the professor in PBL would feel radically different to many who are accustomed to being the center of attention in their teaching. Heavy lifting comes in the form of structuring a problem for students to work on and providing an abundant supply of reading, video, and other resources that will help students think through the problem. When students’ work begins, the professor is in the background facilitating, coaching, and listening until it is time for assessment (Bridges, 1992). The ambiguity and uncertainty created by this method is perhaps as close as a classroom can come to reflecting the day-to-day work of those who aspire to lead schools.

PBL is more than a good fit for effective leadership preparation. It provides an important opportunity for candidates to develop and test their theories of action and to weave these collaboratively with their peers into a theory of practice that can guide them as they enter into administration (Argyris & Schon, 1974). By creating the need for candidates to make decisions in real time, education leadership instructors have the opportunity to help their students reveal the hidden constraints that circumscribe their actions and the consistency and contradictions between candidates’ beliefs about what they should do and what actions they actually take (Argyris, 1999; Argyris & Schon, 1974). PBL provides an exceptional opportunity to sharpen management skills (Grissom & Loeb, 2011) while working on the more complex ability to lead organizational learning.

The freedom given to students to act in leadership roles and make large numbers of decisions requires that they draw from their knowledge of all of the previous five components of this model for leadership preparation. In the PBL context, what may have been discrete knowledge with little meaning beyond a set of information that needed to be committed to memory comes alive in the application to a real-world problem. The developing community problem suggested previously might require professional development plans to help teachers who lack relational skills in the classroom, reworking of daily schedules to allow more flexibility for ninth-grade students and their teachers, knowledge of district policies and procedures if community-building field trips are envisioned, and so on. Perhaps most important, leaders would need to work with their groups to figure out how they would know a greater sense of community when they saw it—namely, they would need a vision for the program they design and means of assessing the extent to which they achieve the vision.

PBL is far more flexible than discipline-based teaching, which is appropriate to developing instructional leadership. Instructional challenges cannot be wholly known a priori and vary greatly from school to school and district to district. Searches for textbook formulae or accepted “best practices” will not likely yield a satisfactory response to an authentic problem, which is as it should be because candidates who presume to lead must find approaches appropriate to the context in which they find themselves. In short, they must be able to think on their feet. Thus, PBL completes this model for instructional leadership preparation as the pedagogy best suited to the ambiguous process of developing leadership capacity (Figure 6).

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Figure 6.

Problem-based learning frames the model as the signature pedagogy for developing instructional leadership

Challenges for Leadership Preparation Programs

Integrating management skills and leadership and organizational theory with pedagogical content knowledge, educational connoisseurship and criticism, and knowledge of and response to context through a problem-based learning pedagogy presents numerous challenges to university faculty conceptions of their teaching and structure of their programs The model has significant implications for both content and process that may require some “retooling” for faculty and leadership aspirants. We do not presume to tell programs the specific components of their curricula or the most effective tactics for implementing PBL. Those issues need to be addressed in individual university and program contexts. For instance, how any given program operationalizes “instructional leadership” should be the outcome of a prolonged discussion among program faculty and, potentially, candidates and school district partners. We can, however, highlight puzzles we believe programs will need to solve.

A Conceptual Framework for Research

The model at this point remains untested and therefore presents some degree of risk to those motivated to adopt it. It is constructed on a set of theories about how instruction results from teacher knowledge, how classrooms may be observed and understood, how context impacts reform efforts, and how to prepare candidates to lead under conditions of ambiguity; and each of these is supported by empirical research. Thus the model is a conceptual framework, a hypothesis about what is likely to happen, that could be applied to future research about the effects of leadership preparation programs on candidates’ thinking and action.

We have some limited experience with leadership preparation focused on instructional leadership through our redesign of the research course we require for licensure (Bauer & Brazer, 2009, 2012) and we have engaged in limited investigation of the effects of that course (Brazer & Bauer, 2011). We are learning that candidates’ experiences in their preparation programs matter, and others are finding similar results (Orr & Orphanos, 2011). The model presented in this article holds promise for articulating how leadership preparation might be conceived and it suggests areas in which data about program content and pedagogy could be collected.