Drawing in the School Context as a Learning Resource in School Leader Development: Application-Oriented Projects in Active Learning Designs

Abstract

This article investigates a yearlong professional development experience provided to two cohorts within a doctoral program for early career school leaders. Drawing from situated learning theory, we examined one aspect of this program’s pedagogy, which centers on the use of field-based application-oriented projects that leaders must take up in their school settings. From this investigation, we identified and reported two key elements of the school context that were regularly drawn into leaders’ application-oriented learning experiences. We also illustratively highlight several of the authentic leadership consideration and practice experiences that were enabled.

Keywords

leadership for school improvement principals principal development active learning professional development in-service leadership development situated learning theory leadership development leadership pedagogies

Introduction

A confluence of factors over the last decade has elevated the importance of school leader development and research to inform development. There is a growing understanding of the important role that school leaders play in relation to school and student success (Béteille, Kalogrides, & Loeb, 2012; Branch, Hanushek, & Rivkin, 2012; Bryk, Sebring, Allensworth, Luppescu, & Easton, 2010; Coelli & Green, 2012; Louis, Leithwood, Wahlstrom, & Anderson, 2010; Robinson, Lloyd, & Rowe, 2008). Persistent concerns have been expressed about the quality of principal preparation and availability of capable principals throughout the United States (Anderson & Turnbull, 2016; Turnbull, Riley, Arcaira, Anderson, & MacFarlane, 2013; The Wallace Foundation, 2016). Moreover, even exemplary forms of preparation have demonstrated the difficulty of cultivating highly proficient levels of practice in areas that are complex and consequential to student learning (Donmoyer, Yennie-Donmoyer, & Galloway, 2012; Huang et al., 2012). This later finding should not be surprising, however, given literature on leader development that suggests leadership expertise is likely to develop over a decade and be strongly motivated by experiences (Day, Harrison, & Halpin, 2009), which may not be easily accessed until a person is in an actual school leadership post (Spillane & Lee, 2014). Taken collectively, these issues suggest the potential for school leaders to have notable developmental needs if they are to be successful. Thus, the need for “more and better principal professional development” is growing (Rowland, 2017, p. 3), as is the need for research to inform developmental designs (Korach & Cosner, 2017).

This article takes up this issue by investigating a yearlong professional development experience provided to two cohorts of early career school leaders within one doctoral program. Drawing from situated learning theory, we examined one aspect of this program’s pedagogy, which centers on the use of field-based application-oriented projects that leaders must take up in their respective school settings. That is, the large-group pedagogy is designed to make leader learning “active” (Desimone, Porter, Garet, Yoon, & Birman, 2002) by engaging leaders with field-based, practice-centered learning experiences that motivate the application of learning within school settings. Using participant interviews after the completion of this yearlong learning experience, we explored whether and what facets of leaders’ school contexts were drawn into or became resources for learning associated with this developmental experience. We also sought to identify key leadership considerations or practice experiences that were afforded. From this investigation, we identified and reported below two key elements of the school context that were regularly drawn into leaders’ application-oriented learning experiences. We also illustratively highlight several of the authentic leadership consideration and practice experiences, constitutive of the practices targeted for development, that were enabled.

This article proceeds as follows. We begin by briefly reviewing literature on large-group learning designs for leadership development and active learning pedagogical approaches, which have been identified as valuable pedagogical approaches. Following these discussions, we briefly elaborate situated learning theory, which we drew on to frame this study. Next we discuss the research methods, including a discussion of the program context and active learning pedagogy as well as the sample, data sources, and analytic approaches. We conclude with finding as well as implications for practice.

Large-Group Learning and Active Learning Pedagogies for Leader Practice Development

Although there are many approaches for leader development, large-group learning experiences often play a significant role in programs of leadership development (Bush, 2009) and remain a common strategy for school leader development (Grissom & Harrington, 2010). Central to such learning designs are the pedagogical strategies emphasized. Strategies that promote the transfer of knowledge to practice are both salient and consequential to leader developmental experiences, because leader practice development is typically a desired developmental outcome (Hitt, Tucker, & Young, 2012; Huber, 2011). Broadly stated, when practice-based outcomes are sought from learning, pedagogical strategies that are well-suited for practice development are of high value to learning designs.

The emphasis on practice development, which is evidenced within the standards for school leaders, necessitates attention to what is meant by and entailed within practice. As discussed in relation to the Professional Standards for School Leaders, professional standards “specify the nature and the quality of work of persons who practice that profession” (National Policy Board for Educational Administration [NPBEA], 2015, p. 2). Thus, standards set expectations for the kinds of practices that school leaders should be able to enact with proficiency. But what is entailed in a practice? Drawing from the work of Bourdieu (1981), Spillane and Miele (2007) suggests that practice can be regarded as a “complicated pattern of behavior that emerges from people’s interaction with each other and with their social situation over time” (p. 59). Thus, practice development is likely to be challenged by more traditional pedagogies that make few authentic connections to and little use of leaders’ school situations.

Both the application of learning, which is performative in nature, and various forms of support for learning application are critical to practice development and maturation (Day et al., 2009). This is consistent with experiential learning theory (Kolb, 1984), which points to experience as a process that supports learning. It is, therefore, not surprising that more “active” pedagogies have been identified as particularly consequential to leader preparation and development (Darling-Hammond, LaPointe, Meyerson, Orr, & Cohen, 2007; Davis, Darling-Hammond, LaPointe, & Meyerson, 2005; Orr, 2011; Orr & Orphanos, 2011; Sutcher, Podolsky, & Espinoza, 2017). Such pedagogies, that engage learners with the application of learning content and/or use the learner’s application experience as a subsequent learning resource, promote learning that “comes as a result of acting in the role of leader, contending with authentic situations” (Gray & Bishop, 2009, p. 29).

When such pedagogies are conceptualized and enacted in more formalized large-group leader learning experiences, they have oftentimes been associated with problem- and case-based learning approaches as well as with simulations, all of which are largely situated, taken up, and worked upon within a large-group learning context rather than within the leader’s authentic situation—an actual school setting (Bridges & Hallinger, 1995; Taylor, Cordeiro, & Chrispeels, 2009). In general, problem-based learning allows the learner to identify a real-world problem and to design a learning experience that explores this problem (Taylor et al., 2009). In contrast, simulations attempt to replicate or imitate within a classroom or learning setting a leadership work task or situation. In a somewhat similar manner, case-based learning typically occurs when students encounter a set of created materials that present a specific learning scenario (e.g., a case) intended to draw into the learning experiences issues and features that learners are likely to encounter if they faced this scenario in the real world. These pedagogies have been regarded as well established and generally advocated for school leader development (Byrne-Jimenez, Gooden, & Tucker, 2017).

Related to both principal preparation and development, the use of action research and inquiry projects has also emerged as additional active learning approaches. Action research typically engages learners with a process of finding and solving a problem associated with a school setting or group of settings sharing similar challenges. A small assortment of such experiences, which have been designed and enacted within various leader preparation and development programs, have been elaborated to varying degrees of detail (e.g., Amrein-Beardsley et al., 2012; Cosner, Tozer, & Zavitkovsky, 2016, Cosner, Tozer, Zavitkovsky, & Whalen, 2015; Osterman, Furman, & Sernak, 2014; Zambo & Isai, 2013). In general, these experiences situate and create learning experiences that begin to straddle the large-group learning setting and an authentic work setting as learners take up one or more facets of inquiry-motivated work in their actual schools.

Conceptual Framing/Situated Learning Theory

Situated learning theory reveals the potential for field-based, practice-centered learning experiences, which we view as a distinct active learning pedagogy, to draw in elements of the school context as learning resources for school leaders during developmental experiences. Situated learning (Lave, 1988; Lave & Wenger, 1991) emphasizes the situated and social nature of learning and brings attention to the situational, environmental, and social contexts of the learner during learning experiences as factors that shape learning and development. Elaborating situated learning, Putnam and Borko (2000) suggest that “the physical and social contexts in which an activity take place are an integral part of the activity, and . . . the activity is an integral part of the learning that takes place” (p. 4). From this perspective the situation of learning matters, and thus different situations can give rise to different learning opportunities (e.g., Cobb, 1994; Putnam & Borko, 2000). Similarly, distributed cognition draws attention to the impact of the situational context on sense-making (Hutchins, 1994; Resnick, 1991). From this perspective, a learning setting or environment can make accessible a range of material, cultural, or social resources that can enable or enhance learning (Spillane, Halverson, & Diamond, 2001).

Method

Setting

The large-group learning experience under examination is embedded within a doctoral program that provides both school leader preparation, during the first 18 months, and development, in the roughly 3 years that follow, to cohorts of students. At the start of the doctoral program, each cohort tends to be comprised of a group of 12 to 20 students; most of whom are teachers and several of whom are early career school leaders. Teachers typically have between 4 and 10 years of teaching experience as well as some teacher leader experience (e.g., grade level or department leader or member of a school-level leadership team). Both elementary and high school teachers are present in every cohort. Cohorts tend to be ethnically diverse with higher percentages of African American and White students and lower percentages of students who are Latinx or of other ethnic backgrounds. Cohorts tend to be fairly balanced by gender but with slightly more females than males.

The first 18 months of the program is designed to prepare aspirants for school leader positions, and it includes a yearlong fully paid principal residency. At the end of this portion of the program, students are licensed as principals and seek principal or assistant principal positions. Historically, nearly all students completing this 18-month portion of the doctoral program secure a principal or assistant principal position soon after gaining licensure.

Following the first 18-month preparation experience, the duration of the doctoral program, which is roughly 3 years, is used for early career leader development. The yearlong development experience that is the focus of this study begins immediately following the preparation phase of the program. This yearlong experience meets roughly every 3 to 4 weeks for 3 hr over a 12-month period. It is designed to teach and provide intensive support for the development of an assortment of practices associated with leading school-wide cycles of inquiry for finding and solving instructional and organizational problems to promote the ongoing improvement of instruction and student learning. To accomplish this, both principals and assistance principals¹ engaged in similar field-based, application-oriented course projects that prompted them to lead processes in their schools for (a) the collection and analysis of student and instructional data to support problem finding and improvement strategy selection and (b) the enactment of teacher-learning designs to support instructional improvement strategy enactment. This development directly relates to Standards 10 and 7 of the Professional Standard for Education Leaders (NPBEA, 2015). Standard 10 expects that leaders are able to “act as agents of continuous improvement to promote each student’s academic success and well-being.” Standard 7 expects that leaders are able to “foster a professional community of teachers and other professional staff to promote each student’s academic success and well-being.” The pedagogy is designed to make leader learning active by anchoring learning to field-based, practice-centered projects that motivate leaders to apply course learning and thus engage in application-oriented learning experiences within their actual school setting.

Sample

This study sample includes two cohorts of early career leaders who participated in this developmental experience during 2 consecutive years. All students in these 2 yearlong course experiences were asked to participate in the study and roughly 75% of the leaders elected to participate (N = 30).² Roughly half of the study participants were principals and roughly half were assistant principals. Nearly all of the participants were in their first or second year as a principal or assistant principal. Nearly all of these individuals were leaders of urban school, many of whom were leading schools in historically underserved urban neighborhoods.

Data Sources

Participant interviews

One in-depth structured interview of roughly 90 min to 2 hr was conducted by a team of graduate students with each participant following the completion of this yearlong learning experience. Interviews were audiotaped, transcribed, and “scrubbed” of anything that may have been a “hidden identifier” of a school leader. Leaders were asked a range of questions to understand their experience and engagement with these practice-based projects. They elaborated key leadership work and actions that they had taken as a result of these projects, identified key application-oriented learning experiences, and their perceptions of the developmental utility of this active learning pedagogy.

Data Analysis

Data were stored and analyzed using Dedoose, a computer software package. Because this work is part of a larger study, during our first round of coding we worked to extract all accountings that related to leaders’ understandings of and engagement with practice-centered projects. We also worked to extract any leader accountings that ascribed developmental utility to these projects and the application-oriented learning experiences with which they engaged. It is worth noting that study participants consistently reported that the application-oriented project work taken up in their respective schools was critical for their leadership practice development. Next, we used our conceptual framework to develop our code book that identified a small number of codes that would receive attention during our second phase of coding. In this work, we focused attention on extracting coded material about key elements of the school context that were drawn into the work task learning experiences including (a) key material resources that were drawn into the learning experience and (b) social resources associated with individuals and within-school teams that were drawn into the learning experience. In both phases of this coding, two members of the research team completed all of this coding and these individuals came together with another member of the research team to compare, discuss, and come to agreement on coding. In our final phase of analysis, we moved all of our extracted material from each of these codes into separate spreadsheets and we identified the following: (a) types of resources within each of the two broad resource categories and (b) leadership considerations or practice experiences constitutive of the practices being targeted for development that were enabled by the application-oriented learning experience.

Findings

In the following section, we report on two key elements of the school context that were drawn into application-oriented learning experiences through the use of this active learning pedagogy. First, we discuss school-based data sources, which emerged as a primary within-school material resource drawn into application-oriented learning experiences. In this discussion, we also illustratively highlight several of the leadership consideration and practice experiences, constitutive of the practices being targeted for development, that were enabled as these material resources within the school were drawn into the application-oriented learning experience. Second, we discuss a small assortment of individuals and school-based teams, which emerged as key social resources drawn into application-oriented learning experiences. In these schools, teams physically connect two or more individuals in a common organizational space and engage those connected in collective work. In this discussion, we also illustratively highlight several of the leadership consideration and practice experiences, constitutive of the practices being targeted for development, that were enabled as these social resources were drawn into the application-oriented learning experiences.

Material Resources, Leadership Consideration, and Practice Experiences

Application-oriented learning projects were designed to engage participants with the leadership of school-wide cycles of inquiry for finding and solving instruction and student-learning problems. Evidence suggests that early facets of this experience encouraged leaders to interact with a range of within-school data, including a range of student and instructional data, which emerged as a key material resource consistently drawn into leaders’ field-based learning experiences. Student data related to a wide assortment of data about student achievement or behavior, such as standardized test scores, formative and benchmark assessments, and student behavior referrals. Instructional data related to such things as lesson and unit plans, student work tasks, and classroom observations. As reported by most of the leaders, application-oriented learning drew in a wide-assortment of student and instructional data sources and provided leaders with occasions to (a) consider the kinds of data to collect; (b) design, engage in, and/or lead processes for the actual collection and analysis of student and instructional data; and/or (c) help teachers in their school make sense of these data and/or conclusions from data analysis. As one leader suggested about this facet of the learning experience, “[the application-oriented learning project] force[s] you to drill down and identify the most appropriate set of data, as opposed to just using any data set.”

In general, application-oriented learning encouraged a range of considerations and practices related to using data within the context of a cycle of inquiry for school improvement. Some of the leaders, for example, came to recognize the importance of certain existing data in their schools. That is, although these data were currently available and largely accessible in their schools, some of the leaders had historically not utilized these data for school-wide problem finding and solving. In these instances, many of these leaders worked to enact new processes to draw these data into the school’s inquiry process. As a result of the application-oriented learning, one school leader, for example, reported the use of aggregate teacher evaluation data as an aspect of their work to find school-wide instructional problems:

We used observation results, and throughout the school year this was done in several cycles . . . [then we] brought the data back and analyzed with the ILT [instructional leadership team], and then reported it back out to the school . . .

Several others, for example, came to recognize the importance of multiple data sources and worked to enact new processes for the collection and combined use of several different kinds of data, which expanded the range of data sources being collected and utilized for such purposes in their respective schools. One school leader reported about the expanded range of data sources that she and others now used as a result of the application-oriented project:

We looked at student work samples, we looked at the students’ grades, we looked at the types of books that the students were being assigned to read in class, the types of tasks they were being assigned. So it was more of a holistic looking in terms of the multiple forms of data . . . it was much broader than what we, what we’ve done in the past.

In several instances, leaders also reported that these field-based application-oriented learning experiences prompted them to engage in sense-giving practices that drew upon analyzed data to strengthen teacher meaning making about problems of practice. One leader, for example, described his actions of presenting school-wide instructional data to teachers to support teacher meaning making of the instructional problems revealed from data analysis and to encourage teacher commitment to acting upon these findings:

I was taking all the observation data . . . collected for math, in math . . . classrooms, and it was this tool that I had obtained that aligned to the Common Core, and I aggregated, like a lot of this data, regarding Standards of Mathematical Practice and the Common Core, and I was just . . . I really gotta show this to teachers, and it was just such a powerful reminder for me that data can mobilize, that you also as leader have to frame things in a way that helps people understand . . . And like, the way that I put that data together on that graph just made it so crystal clear that they don’t do anything related to it [mathematics instructional practices being examined]. . .

Social Resources, Leadership Consideration, and Practice Experiences

Evidence suggests that these application-oriented experiences drew several social resources into these learning experiences including three different types of individuals and/or teams: (a) teachers and teacher teams (e.g., department or grade-level teacher groups), (b) school-level leadership teams and individual administrative and teacher leaders, and (c) network and district leaders. Although these individuals and teams tended to be drawn into application-oriented learning experiences, we foreground for illustrative purposes primary ways in which these individuals and teams were drawn into learning experience. Accordingly, these leaders drew teachers and various teacher teams into these learning experiences as they engaged or sought to deepen or support teacher engagement with facets of their school’s cycle of inquiry work. Leaders drew other school administrators and teacher leaders, both in teams and individually, into the learning experiences as other leaders were engaged jointly or individually in providing leadership for facets of the cycle of inquiry work and as leaders sought to support and develop teams and individuals for such leadership work. Network and district leaders were drawn into these learning experiences because of expectations that they placed on leaders and their schools or due to their access to resources that had potential to affect with schools’ cycle of inquiry work improvement.

Teachers

The enactment of application-based learning experiences that centered on leading cycles of inquiry for school improvement caused leaders to draw into the learning experience most or all of the teachers in their schools including instructors of Grades kindergarten through 12 in a range of content areas (e.g., English/language arts, science, mathematics, social studies) and special education teachers. This occurred as leaders engaged teachers with certain facets of their school’s cycle of inquiry learning and work and as leaders sought and worked to gain, deepen, or support the engagement of teachers with various facets of this learning and work.

Most leaders, for example, reported taking actions to engage teachers with work to strengthen their existing teaching or to cultivate new teaching practices—which typically emerged as central to a school’s selected improvement strategy and work. One school leader described such improvement work, manifest from work associated with his application-based learning, which sought to strengthen teachers’ use of student assessment results for instructional planning and teaching:

[T]eachers had to do two different things. So the first is that they had to submit a global analysis and an item analysis of their quarterly assessment data and in that they had to identify areas of opportunity and areas of success that they had . . . [T]hen they had to do a re-teaching plan and so that re-teaching plan, it had to be focused on a very specific misconception or sub-skill that kids did not master that you realized for your item analysis, then that ultimately had to translate into re-assessment data.

Desired changes to teachers’ instructional practices typically necessitated sustained opportunities for teachers to learn new practices. Thus, application-based learning experiences provided many of the leaders with opportunities to lead the design of within-school teacher learning experiences as well as to engage teachers with new learning designs and approaches. One school leader’s discussion of the kinds of learning experiences that he had introduced as a part of his application-based learning is illustrative:

Teachers were videoing their own practice and sharing it with small groups and so we went through cycles where [we] planned a lesson, discussed a lesson and one teacher would share a video of part of the lesson and then the teachers would all be able to watch and comment on it and share feedback and they’d never done anything like this here at the school before.

Of importance, such occurrences also allowed a number of the leaders to experiences issues that prompted leader sense-giving (Coburn, 2005), and to engage in leadership sense-giving practices for the purpose of seeking, cultivating, or strengthening the engagement of teachers with facets of their school’s cycle of inquiry improvement learning and work. In several instances, for example, school leaders reported opportunities for sense-giving considerations after they experienced resistance or “push back” from several teachers related to their engagement with a facet of the school’s cycle of inquiry work. These experiences allowed leaders to consider the importance of cultivating or strengthening teachers’ shared understandings about the school’s instructional improvement work, including the reasons for such work, to promote their readiness and generate an imperative for improvement-focused work. One leader reported the following circumstance as an important field-based learning opportunity:

[W]hen we started to roll things out in like fall, I received some pushback that I’d never gotten before. . . . And so . . . we talk a lot about sense-making [in class], and I thought okay, I haven’t made, helped them make sense of why we’re doing this.

In contrast, several other leaders noticed instances where certain teachers were less engaged with learning and/or work associated with strengthening their teaching practices and reported as developmentally consequential opportunities for learning how to diagnose or better understand reasons for these types of occurrences. For example, one leader reported, “I started to go to different people who were kind of like informal [teacher] leaders in the school, just to be like, what . . . is going on with this?”

Teacher teams

Consistently, leaders reported engaging and interacting with teacher teams, generally grade-level or department teacher teams that had designated meeting time within the workday, as they took up the application-centered learning experiences. In this district context, such teams typically have time built into the existing workday with a certain frequency (such as weekly or bi-weekly) and where part of this time is to be directed by school leaders. Many leaders reported actions to engage teacher teams for the purpose of engaging these social settings as supports to teachers’ learning and instructional improvement work associated with the school’s cycle of inquiry. In relation to her application-oriented learning, one school leader, for example, discussed her consideration of the importance of engaging teacher teams with her school’s instructional improvement work as follows:

[S]o our school does Flex PD. You know we’ve got . . . an hour per month we’re able to spend on professional development and that’s all the time that is explicitly devoted to professional development, and I’ve realized about the mid-point of the year it’s just not enough . . . Instead . . . we spent our weekly [principal-directed teacher team] meeting time on . . . this instructional strategy ’cause we could then hit it week after week after week for months on end. [A]nd so for me it was understanding that teacher meeting time, most schools have it on a weekly basis, that’s your better source for teacher learning than this monthly or quarterly PD time . . .

In some instances, leaders engaged teacher teams with new kinds of learning experiences and routines as this leader describes in relation to her application-oriented learning:

[T]omorrow in the math department meeting . . . we’re going to have these tech talks in which teachers are sharing different like apps and websites and things that they’ve used for them to explore over the summer, to like, and so they’re just, for a school in which the average teacher has worked here 10 to 15 years, they’re really pushing themselves out of their comfort zone, and so that in terms of like new [learning] routines, it’s really exciting to see that.

School-level leadership teams

As a facet of the field-based application-oriented learning experience, nearly all of the school leaders reported engaging and interacting with one or more school-level leadership teams with aspects of the school’s cycle of inquiry improvement work. Oftentimes leaders reported the engagement of an existing school-wide leadership team, such as an instructional leadership team (ILT). Although varied in membership, these teams tended to bring together an assortment of teacher leaders (e.g., department chairs or grade-level leaders) with connections to smaller teacher teams in the school (e.g., a range of department or grade-level teams). Generally, these teams were engaged to jointly provide leadership for one or more facets of the cycle of inquiry improvement work.

A number of school leaders, for example, reported engaging and interacting with a school-wide leadership team on processes for jointly leading the collection of school-wide instructional data as an early element of their work to find or understand instructional problems. One school leader’s accounting of consequential developmental experiences is illustrative of this sort of engagement and interaction:

I developed the initial tool, like a little learning walk tool to start to do some [classroom] walkthroughs with my leadership team and to collect data on . . . the kinds of questions teachers were asking kids . . . so we wanted to collect question direction, and we wanted to collect data on question levels according to Webb’s Depth of Knowledge . . .

A number of leaders reported engaging and interacting with a school-level leadership team to jointly plan for the enactment of strategies selected to resolve or address the instructional issues that had been identified. For example, one leader reported as developmentally consequential her work to engage and collaborate with a school-level leadership team for the planning of the enactment of their school’s improvement strategy:

[I] spent the last two months working with . . . our ILT [instructional leadership team] . . . in planning out how we’re going to get better unit plans and unit assessments next year, right, and what that instructional cycle is going to look like for our teachers.

Another leader similarly elaborated engaging and interacting with her school-level leadership team as a consequential element of her application-oriented learning:

So the last two ILT meetings, what we’ve done is we’ve designed . . . an 8-week cycle of department meeting activities that will start out with sharing assessments and making sure that we really have awesome unit assessments according to . . . IBMYP [International Baccalaureate Learner Profiles] criteria cause we’re an IB [International Baccalaureate] school, and then . . . sharing unit plans and talking . . . a lot of this is about making [teacher] practice public, developing these [teacher learning] routines of, we’re going to share . . . plans, we’re going to talk about it and make sure that our unit plans are getting us to where we need to go . . . for the assessment, and the assessment is sort of the benchmark of, it’s sort of the embodiment of what we think the standards are for that, we’re trying to get the students to attain it for that unit.

Interaction and engaging with these leadership teams provided some of the leaders with occasions to consider and take actions to re-engineer teams or enact practices to diagnose and develop or strengthen teams for joint leadership work. Aspects of the application-oriented learning that proved especially complex and challenging for one of the leaders related to such considerations and work:

So I, like, the biggest challenge this year was . . . helping teacher leaders come to a different understanding of what their purpose was in the building, and I think, like, coming in and knowing that . . . there was a leadership team already established was kind of, that felt good . . . but I would say about a month into the work it became very obvious that . . . their understanding of what they were supposed to be doing was not my understanding of what they should be doing. So the time that it took to . . . develop that expectation or re-imagine what their purpose could be, that was by far the biggest [challenge].

Relatedly, another leader discussed as critical work that she undertook to engage the leadership team with a process of self-assessment or diagnosis:

There is an article in a couple different classes . . . by Kruse about effective learning communities, and I created a tool based on that article. There are five different structural conditions . . . that are in effective professional learning communities. I created a survey for my ILT that had them defining those pieces. I pulled those definitions out of those articles. I had my ILT read the article, and then take a survey that evaluates how strong those pieces appear in our ILT team meetings and write a narrative about how they know. So then I took all the data, complied it, then passed back out to them, and spent two to three hours reading through the data, and determining whether or not we agree with it, and what we need to do about it.

The enactment of application-oriented projects also prompted some of the leaders to form, populate, and/or draw in functional teams. Functional teams were defined by the purpose they served, for example, a school culture committee that worked to improve or strengthen the school culture. One leader, for example, reported on several new functional teams that had been created as he engaged in this learning experience: “The math team work, the curriculum team work, the restorative justice team work . . . grows out of the [application-oriented learning experience].” The creation of these teams tended to occur as leaders identified particular aspects of school-wide cycle of inquiry work that would benefit from purposefully orchestrated teams to lead facets of the work. Across this assortment of school leaders, functional teams were created for (a) improving school discipline policies (e.g., restorative justice committee), (b) encouraging the engagement of the members of the school community (e.g., parent club), (c) improving specific areas of instruction (e.g., literacy team), and (d) building more positive school cultures (e.g., culture committee).

Administrative and teacher leaders

The enactment of application-oriented learning experiences by school leaders consistently drew in an assortment of teacher and administrative leaders within the school including individuals in the role of deans, department chairs, grade-level leaders, assistant principals, principals, instructional coaches, and members of various school leadership teams (who may have also served as a member of a school-wide leadership team). This tended to occur as leaders engaged other administrative and teacher leaders to provide more individualized leadership for various facets of the cycle of inquiry work. Oftentimes, this individualized leadership entailed providing leadership within individual department or grade-level teams.

As reported by some of the leaders, application-oriented learning that drew in various teacher leaders, oftentimes prompted leaders to consider, and thus, provided them with occasions to take actions to cultivate or strengthen the leadership practices of others. Such an experience is illustrated by the following leader’s accounting that related to developing the communication skills of those teachers tasked with leading various teacher teams throughout the school:

I’ve been working on developing [members of] my leadership team, and they really they’re not used to working with teams, in a leadership capacity with their teams. It has been more of a clerical type of work before, I believe, and from the things that they’ve said, and just the questions they’ve asked. So yesterday when we were talking about becoming better, and really increasing the, improving dynamics within the teams, and how the discussions that we have roll out to the other teams, we talked about . . . communication being a really important skill.

Not surprisingly, one of the leaders drew attention to teacher leadership development, prompted through her application-oriented learning experiences, as important to her own leadership practice development:

[T]his [application-oriented learning] really made me push and grow, and develop others. In terms of developing a department head . . . So he and I met every single week . . . he needed to be the one who was coming in for the, with a lot of the ideas, the one who was framing it for a lot of the teachers.

Network and district leaders

The enactment of application-oriented learning experiences by school leaders occasionally drew in network (e.g., district subregions) or district leaders, which included administrative leaders beyond the level of the individual school who tended to have some formal level of authority over participants. Leaders’ interactions with network and district leaders manifesting in relation to application-oriented learning were reported by several of the leaders and appeared to be much less central to the leaders’ day-to-day work in comparison with their accountings that related to teachers and other school-based leaders. In these instances, leaders tended to report situations where external leaders either held expectations for the leader and/or his or her school that could affect their school’s cycle of inquiry work or where these leaders held resources that could support aspects of this work. These instances tended to create occasions for leaders to consider these expectations in relation to their school’s cycle of inquiry work, and to enact practices to either bridge or buffer (Honig & Hatch, 2004) teachers and their schools from external demands based largely on discernments of alignment. Describing application-oriented learning experiences that occurred as district or network leaders were drawn into this work. One of the leaders suggested the following as an area of practice that had been strengthened:

So I protected them from all of the nonsense stuff that disjointed [our school] . . . So I feel like I really did a better job of protecting them from that noise and protecting all of us . . .

Speaking about leadership practices that were enacted and strengthened through these application-oriented learning experiences, another leader shared a somewhat similar accounting:

The skill I would say, to name it . . . would be buffering. So how do you buffer the external demand . . . with what your teachers really want and need and ensure that they’re growing and learning in the process?

Discussion

Expectations for the practice of school leaders documented in leadership standards elevate the importance of active learning experiences that are designed to encourage the transfer of knowledge to practice. With this in mind, we examined early career leader development experiences with an active learning pedagogy that centers on field-based, practice-oriented projects designed to motivate the application of learning and application-based learning experiences. To consider the potential developmental affordance of such an active learning design, we marshaled situated learning theory to identify key situational resources—including both material and social elements of the school context—that school leaders drew into their learning experiences as they took up these application-oriented projects within their schools. We also illustratively revealed several of the authentic leadership consideration and practice experiences, constitutive of the practices targeted for development that were enabled by these application-oriented learning experiences. Of importance, these findings reveal another approach for creating active learning designs that centers on the use of field-based, application-oriented projects. Thus, these findings add to and expand the existing body of literature on active learning pedagogies that have been documented in relation to principal preparation or development (e.g., Bridges & Hallinger, 1995; Taylor et al., 2009). Based on these findings, we argue that a large-group leadership development pedagogy that emphasizes field-based, practice-centered learning experiences has potential for drawing into the learning experience important material and social elements of the school context that are central to the practices being developed, and thus, enabling of the kinds of authentic leadership considerations and practice experiences that are constitutive to practice development.

Our research points to several implications for practice. Most important, our research suggests that school leader developers seeking to strengthen school leader practice would be wise to consider whether and what school situations and resources are drawn into school leader learning experiences. Identification of the material and social context resources within leaders’ school settings that are elemental to the practices being developed and construction of active learning designs that draw these context resources into leader learning experiences are likely to be of utility to the learning experiences of school leaders.

Footnotes

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: The author(s) received financial support from the U.S. Department of Education and The Wallace Foundation.

Notes

Author Biographies

Shelby Cosner is an associate professor of Educational Organizations and Leadership in the Department of Educational Policy Studies in the College of Education at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Her research interests include organizational change, school reform and improvement, leadership for school improvement, principal preparation/development/evaluation, and principal preparation program improvement. In addition to this journal, her work appears in Educational Administration Quarterly, the Journal of Educational Administration, the Journal of School Leadership, Leadership and Policy in Schools, Urban Education, Educational Management Administration and Leaderhsip and Planning and Changing.

Craig De Voto is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Educational Policy Studies in the College of Education at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

April Andry Rah’man is a doctoral student in the Department of Educational Policy Studies in the College of Education at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

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