Fostering Tomorrow's Educational Leaders
Creators: name: Stack, Michelle, 1967-
name: Coulter, David
name: Grosjean, Garnet
name: Mazawi, André Elias
name: Smith, Graham Hingangaroa
Publisher: name: The University of British Columbia
Year: 2019

description: School leaders are enmeshed in complex, overlapping, and often conflicting webs of relationships from which they must make educational meaning. How do we determine which leadership skills, knowledge and values are required, who decides them, and by what criteria? It is this conceptual vagueness around educational leadership that we believe reveals a fundamental challenge with programs and policies that foster educational leadership. To us, the single most important question in education is, what are valid, defensible educational ends and who gets to decide them? This study - “Fostering Tomorrow’s Educational Leaders”-- is shaped by this core question. It provides the context for our analysis of 12 graduate educational leadership and administration (ELA) programs offered in British Columbia. Researching educational ends is, however, only part of our study: we also report on how universities aim to foster their avowed ends, that is, decide what means they will use to help people become educational leaders. Our findings show that despite much activity to promote leadership, there exists no consensus on what it means or how best to develop it. Nevertheless, our participants were unanimous in distinguishing leadership from management and administration, although they disagreed about the basis for the distinction. Among the programs we studied, we found two major commonalities. First, the “competency” approach to leadership development and assessment is widespread. Second, all programs studied advocate the integration of theory and practice in educational leadership. Our findings also revealed globalization and Americanization have had major impacts on ELA programs in BC. The power of market forces expressed in these movements means that important aspects of education are often left unattended. In our analysis of faculty and student composition, we determined that, in all, only about 70 tenure-track faculty are involved in the 12 programs studied. Programs rely extensively on contract sessional instructors and adjuncts, hired on an ad-hoc basis. The lack of BC- based tenure-track faculty may pose substantial challenges in terms of meeting the needs of BC’s future educational leaders. ELA programs tend to recruit students who are mid-career working professionals with several years of experience, often in positions of leadership. We estimate that between 1,200 and 1,300 BC students attend the programs we surveyed. In terms of equity, many ELA programs remain male-dominated; while women and other equity groups are underrepresented in most faculties. But we noted an increasing representation of women in the student body. And, while none of the programs surveyed has an explicit affirmative action policy in place, many are keen to ensure diversity. Still, many coordinators struggled to articulate just what it might mean to ensure a diverse student body in their programs. With regard to aboriginal education, our analysis indicates four general issues associated with ELA programs: (1) little concern about aboriginal leadership as a specifi c focus; (2) few aboriginal faculty trained in this academic specialty; (3) little indigenous content is systematically taught within general leadership curricula; (4) relatively few aboriginal students take up educational leadership studies in the province. To address the growing demand for leadership programs, traditional methods of on-campus instruction are being complemented by flexible or distance modes of delivery. The drive towards online education is fuelled by several factors, particularly the increasing globalization of the field and the push towards the academization of leadership positions. One of the major impacts of this trend is a retreat from face-to-face interaction and a transformation of the student-instructor relationship into a service provider-customer relationship in which issues of service adequacy and effectiveness often take precedence. Another significant shift in ELA programs is the emergence of the cohort model as the dominant form of program delivery. In some programs there has been a deliberate attempt to go beyond the cohort model and create different dynamics. A major challenge in our survey has been to explore how the various programs construe ELA in terms of course offerings. We found significant diversity in how core, required and elective courses are incorporated into a program. Furthermore, as universities shift towards the cohort model, differences emerge between on and off campus programs. In several universities specialized areas of educational leadership have been identified, resulting in the offering of programs that focus on selected aspects of schooling. The total credit hours for degree completion varies between 18 and 54 credits, though the majority of ELA programs require between 30 to 36 credit hours. The majority of programs offer courses that draw on social science, learning, leadership, administration and research while a few are grounded in philosophy, psychology and policy. Programs differ extensively in their emphasis on research and how research is defined. For some programs, established scientific inquiry is the gold standard, while others incorporate field-based research methods, action research and collaborative models. The relative emphasis on research also differs between magistral and doctoral programs, with the latter emphasizing policy and research courses as part of their offerings. To guide our study, we developed three subquestions, fi rst grappling with conceptions of educational leadership in a democratic context. Second, examining various attempts to foster educational leadership. Third, drawing on these answers to suggest ways that universities might attempt to foster educational leadership. On the first, the nature of educational leadership, we found few attempts to distinguish it from, for example, military or business leadership. As a result, the ends of education can reproduce values that have little regard for the democratic pursuit of multiple, often conflicting, yet equally worthy, ends. Second, on how educational leadership is fostered, we found excessive emphasis on propositional knowledge leading to the (mistaken) conviction that there is one ‘best’ form of practice. Third, in terms of how universities can help foster educational leadership, we call on ELA programs to draw on new critical perspectives and intellectual resources to understand education and educational leadership. Further, we see a need network where people from various ELA programs can engage in constructive debate. To that end, we argue that there is a need to broaden the conversation rather than narrowing it to issues of certification. We further recommend that given the isolation of ELA programs from each other and the wider community, that The Association of British Columbia Deans of Education establish an ongoing educational leadership network (“ELNet”), linking educational leadership programs in BC. Facilitated by a secretariat rotated among BC universities, ELNet’s mandate would include responsibility for opening new and promising conversations about educational leadership in a democracy. The addition of new and previously marginalized voices to the conversation about education and educational leadership would be a particular focus. We further recommend that to foster profound, ongoing exchange of perspectives about education and educational leadership, ELA programs should recruit faculty and students, and develop instructional strategies, with diversity in mind in order to grapple with such central questions as what counts as education and educational leadership in a pluralist, democratic society.