[00:01] Announcer:
Welcome to Principal Center Radio, helping you build capacity for instructional leadership. Here's your host, Director of the Principal Center, Dr. Justin Baeder. Welcome, everyone, to Principal Center Radio.
[00:13] Justin Baeder:
I'm your host, Justin Baeder, and I'm honored to welcome to the program Michelle Young, Anne Odorty, and Katie Cunningham, the authors of Redesigning Educational Leadership Preparation for Equity, Strategies for Innovation and Improvement.
[00:29] Announcer:
And now, our feature presentation.
[00:31] Justin Baeder:
Welcome to Principal Center Radio. Thank you. Thank you. So it is exciting to have a collaborative team on the show talking about the work that you've done through the University Council for Educational Administration. Michelle Young is Dean of the School of Education at Loyola Marymount University and former Executive Director of UCEA. Anne O'Doherty is Teaching Professor and Director of the Danforth Educational Leadership Program, which let me tell you, they'll let anybody in.
[00:58]
It's just, you got to watch that place. at the University of Washington, my alma mater. And Katie Cunningham is Assistant Professor of Educational Leadership and Policies at the University of South Carolina. To kick things off, where this book came from, what work this came out of, and what need you saw in the field to write Redesigning Educational Leadership Preparation for Equity?
[01:18] Keith Young:
Anne and I have been working with each other for close to 20 years, I think. And when we were working as professors at the University of Texas, we were editing this short section of the UCEA review, which featured innovative programs. And the reason that we were putting that together is because we knew that there were lots of things that were happening within preparation programs that were exciting and cutting edge and research-based. And we wanted to make sure we had a way of kind of extending the reach, if you will, of those promising practices. At some point in those conversations, we thought, you know, we need to actually gather these together with a set of tools and a bit more intentionality for people who are really interested in thinking about how they move the needle on their own programs to be able to actually prepare the kinds of leaders that our schools need.
[02:18]
Anne has more of this story.
[02:20] Justin Baeder:
So I'd say after we've been at that for a while and just so you know, we both moved states, we both moved positions like multiple times around that time period. And so things started to morph and change. And I have to say, we invited Katie to come join us. She was working with Michelle at University of Virginia at the time. And when we asked Katie to come join us, we had an epiphany about this book and it really helped us shape it in a different way. Rather than just gathering these kind of disparate ideas around innovation, we mapped out what does it really take to have a program.
[02:54]
And we actually have a photograph of these sticky notes on these large glass windows that we were working with. And we completely mapped out, like, what does it take to have a program and came out with our chapters and then started thinking about who were the programs that we would feature in each chapter. like specific programs that we were aware of in the work that they were doing. And it really changed the direction. We also started thinking about our own stories and how the stories of our redesign work had gone in the different institutions that we'd worked with. And those stories became the vignettes.
[03:28]
It was fun to put that together, to kind of take it from story and research and what's the great work that our colleagues are doing in the field and kind of mush all that together into a book.
[03:38] Keith Young:
I think one of the neat components that I noticed when I joined the team, and I was so grateful to be able to join, is that what Anne was saying and what Michelle was saying are drawing from what was already happening in the field and really lifting up those stories because it provided some realistic models. Like, we can do this too, and here's how this might work in our own context and really have that bridge of theory to practice and practice to continue to improve upon practice.
[04:04] Keith Young:
While we were doing this, there were also these external drivers within the policy environment and also within the foundations environment where they were asking questions of how do we know that what we're doing in leadership preparation programs actually matters? And why should we partner with higher education instead of building our own programs? We know what effective leadership looks like. Maybe we should be doing it without higher education. So in addition to the work that was happening on the ground that we were seeing, UCEA, as well as Division A of the American Education Research Association, were really pulling people together to think critically about leadership preparation in a way that had never happened before. So that was kind of stirring the pot, if you will, within our field of effective practice because people were trying new things and they were collecting data on what they were doing and they were writing a lot of literature about what they were doing.
[05:07]
And all of these things created this really wonderful kind of nexus of resources for us to really dig into and figure out how we could create tools for our field that people could use to get better at getting better.
[05:21] Justin Baeder:
many of our listeners may not be aware that there is an entire corner of our profession dedicated to thinking about and studying educational leadership preparation, the training of school leaders, educational leaders, school principals. How school leaders are trained is one of those things that obviously needs to be thought about, but we might not have done much thinking about who actually does that thinking and does that research. So UCEA is, I assume, the kind of the premier group for doing and organizing that thinking and research. And that's where you have hung out for the last however many years doing this work. And one of the themes that runs through this for me is intentionality, right? The idea of purposefully designing programs to produce the kind of candidates that we need in our profession.
[06:09]
And as you mentioned, Katie, just a minute ago, school districts are often think of this question as one that they can tackle. What kind of leaders do we want to prepare from among our own teachers? What do we want to do to develop a leadership pipeline that produces the kind of school leaders we need? But typically this work is done in partnership with universities. Before we get into some of the elements of that intentionality and what it means to prepare educational leaders to lead for equity, I want to kind of draw a contrast, not to criticize anyone, but to just kind of paint the picture of what happens when we don't have that intentionality And we have educational leadership preparation programs that may be criticized as just cash cows for the university, right? If we can get some people to sign up and pay us 10 or 20 grand for another master's degree, well, hey, why the heck not?
[06:57]
And, you know, hopefully most people are finding that their programs are not that way. But I certainly see quite a range in terms of how well people are prepared when they come out of those programs. to actually take on educational leadership roles. I'm often hearing from people at the beginning of their leadership career, taking those first steps and just the variation from program to program, to be frank, is quite wide. So what did you see collectively when you looked at the programs that maybe we're most hungry for or most in need of redesign? What's kind of the landscape of preparation programs that maybe are where they are, not because of intentionality, but just because things unfolded the way they did, and now there's a need to be intentional?
[07:37]
I will just say from working with the different school district partners that I've worked with directly, either through the University of Washington, UT Austin, or through the Wallace Foundation work that we were engaged in, I think one of the things that you hear is whether or not people are successful once they leave a program. And I think once a program decides that their outcomes are critically important and really the only reason for being successful, And it's not just that their folks get hired, but their graduates are actually making a difference in the lives of students, making a difference in the lives of teachers, making a difference in the communities in which they work. That all of those pieces, I think when a program makes that decision that they have to have the outcomes that they want to seek, that's a turning point for them.
[08:21] Keith Young:
You know, to your point, Justin, There are lots of different pressures pushing down on that leadership preparation program. So if a organization is very much bent on increasing revenues and you have a set of faculty who don't know what best practice is and don't have those tools within their toolkit to say, this is not the program that's going to be your cash cow. And these are the reasons. Leadership has one of the most important impacts on student learning and teacher effectiveness, and it's unethical to think that we would be creating a program that really has two purposes, to give people a degree that would give them a salary bump and to bring more revenue into the institution.
[09:12]
That's kind of like a deal breaker for people who really understand the importance of leadership development and what it takes to do a really high quality program. And one of those things that we've learned through research is that the cohort model, which is never a good model for a cash cow program, is really, really an essential piece of it. And there are lots of other pieces that also just do not lend themselves to this notion of a cash cow or leadership. as Anne was talking about, to just sort of willy-nilly throwing together a preparation program. You really have to have from the very beginning an idea of the types of leaders that you want to build. And part of that is in partnership.
[09:54]
And Katie, in particular, has got some just really amazing expertise just in terms of this notion of collaboration and partnership.
[10:02] Justin Baeder:
Let's talk about that, if we could, because I think that intentionality of figuring out what do our districts need? What do our district partners need in terms of the types of candidates that we're graduating? And what do the people who are being recruited into this program need to become that kind of person? is a very different set of questions than, you know, what list of courses do we think we should teach? And then boom, we'll teach them and we're done. Katie, take us into that a little bit more.
[10:25]
What does that purposeful design process look like?
[10:28] Keith Young:
The purposeful design. And I like that you said word intentionality. That's something that we've been thinking a lot about too. And we come back to that specific term as well. That purposeful design, that intentionality really requires deep trusting collaboration between and among people. faculty within the leadership preparation program with our district stakeholders and partners.
[10:51]
And I think the way that that happens is it takes a lot of time and it takes some explicit communication about those goals of what we are hoping our leaders are able to do and the types of change they're able to forward as they step into those more formalized leadership roles. But there's a lot of, I would say, a lot of behind the scenes work and a lot of that groundwork that needs to happen. So having deep conversations about, you know, what are the goals of the program? What are the goals of the district? How might those goals coalesce together so that there's a program that can be designed while listening to our district partners. I mean, the opportunities to quite literally sit at the table or sit in the same Zoom room or wherever we are to talk about what those courses are.
[11:36]
And I appreciate what you said about like, it's more than just what courses are we going to teach and then deciding to do that. It's having ongoing conversations about what should we teach? And why? And what are the types of things that we can authentically prepare this next generation of leaders for? Because there are a lot of challenges out there and there's a need for some adaptive leadership opportunities that can better support the teachers in the schools, the staff in the schools, and then ultimately our students. But it is that collaboration, that conversation, that trust building time spent in each other's spaces in order to cultivate that sort of partnership to redesign.
[12:10] Justin Baeder:
What are some of the barriers that typically get identified when we say, OK, here's what our districts need. Here are the kind of candidates that we need to lead our schools. And here are the people who are available to enter this program. And I know probably recruitment is a big part of the equation. But what are some of the biggest challenges that programs identify when they engage in this redesign work and say, hey, if we need to get people from point A to point B, what challenges do they encounter in doing that? We probably write about time.
[12:36]
It comes up, I think, in every single chapter that we talk about time. You know, all of us have worked at universities, and so we have an understanding of the university flow. And we've also all worked in school districts, and so we have an understanding of school district flow. And those two The priorities that you're trying to juggle and deal with on a daily basis, it's the whole focusing on the urgent rather than the important. How do you keep people really engaged and focused on this large, purposeful work when you know there are a thousand other details that are going to come in their way? And I think that's one of the strengths that we were able to focus on too, is this idea that when you do have time together, how do you use that time?
[13:18]
There's a variety of tools that are in the book, but then we also talk about back to the intentionality. You know, what are the organizational routines that you have? And how can you take those organizational routines that you have either in a school district or in a university or together and really intentionally use that time so that you can keep propelling forward and not get kind of mired in the day-to-day?
[13:40] Keith Young:
You know, and I think one additional thing to time organizational routines is the infrastructure of the two organizations. You really have to take into consideration the human resources that are put towards the partnership and towards the preparation program. You know, whether that is district-level contacts and the university-level contacts, getting to Katie's point about partnerships and the relationship issue, I mean, Having kind of point people who are making sure that that relationship continues to grow and foster and bloom in a way that benefits the overarching goals of the program is really important. But then also taking a look at like what kinds of structures and policies in the district or in the university are making it more difficult to do the good work. And we could probably name hundreds of things.
[14:34]
But you need to, again, kind of prioritize and say, okay, well, these are the things that we really need to figure out how to shift in order to make this work work. And then these are the things that would be nice to shift and so forth and so on.
[14:48] Justin Baeder:
Let's talk a little bit, if we could, about recruitment, because I think both for districts and for ed leadership preparation programs, diversity is a big challenge, right? Recruiting a diverse candidate pool, a candidate pool that reflects the diversity of the student population seems to be a perennial challenge. What are some of the dimensions of that challenge? And what are university programs and districts doing in partnership to address that challenge?
[15:12] Keith Young:
One of the biggest challenges, Justin, is the pipeline itself. You know, if you think about the population of individuals who are getting a college degree and then that portion that's actually going into teaching, those are the folks that we tend to draw from for education leadership. So if we continue with that kind of a model where we're just sort of taking a small percentage of each percentage, we're never going to get to the point where we need to. So again, this notion of intentionality, of leaning in and saying, we are going to do this, and we're going to kind of think outside of the box in terms of how we go about doing this recruitment, that's really, really important. A good example for you is one of the things that we do here at Loyola Marymount. We have partnered with a nonprofit organization called Diversity and Leadership Institute.
[16:02]
And with Diversity and Leadership, LMU has been working in multiple districts to identify leaders of color to come into these individualized cohorts specifically designed to build a cadre of leaders of color. So that's one strategy, but there are lots of other strategies. But again, kind of the key to them is that intentionality and having a partner or partners that help you make sure that you are reaching types of individuals in the field who have that cultural know-how. Research absolutely demonstrates that leaders of color make such a huge difference, not just for teachers of color and kids of color, but for all kids and all teachers in their schools. So it behooves us to do this work regardless, but that also has implications for our own faculty and their ability to work with
[17:00]
a larger proportion of students of color and our curriculum. And one of the things we haven't talked about yet is our pedagogy. and the types of powerful learning experiences that we engage them in.
[17:12] Justin Baeder:
There's two different things I think of like with recruitment. There's the experiences that happen for people before you recruited them, and then there's the experiences that happen in the program. One of the things that we see in programs that are successfully rising in their diversity is that they're working with their partners about getting the kinds of experiences for potential candidates before the program. So being an instructional coach is a really wonderful pathway to becoming an instructional leader and then becoming a principal. But who are your instructional coaches? So when you look at a school district and you say you have 40 instructional coaches, who are they?
[17:48]
What do they look like? How do they represent and identify? That's an area that the school district can be working on of saying, oh, we need to be more intentional and thoughtful about who we are tapping into these leadership roles, who are department chairs, team leaders, instructional coaches, academic deans, those types of experiences, which tend to tap people into the more formal leadership roles. And then once you're in the program, the other side of that intentionality is just what Michelle was saying about pedagogy and curriculum. But it's also taking a really hard look at your program and asking yourself, are we using inclusive readings? Are we using the same thing that we've used for 40 years?
[18:25]
And maybe some of those 40-year-old pieces are excellent. And maybe some of them are triggering. And maybe they don't carry the same message for everyone that you think that they do. So I think you have to be willing and able to be influenced by your students. So once your program becomes more diverse, you have to be open and willing to experience, as Dakota Irby talks about it, it's black and brown people's influential presence, like not just being there, but actually influencing what's happening. And I think programs also have to be intentional about who they're hiring as their faculty.
[18:57]
And having faculty members who have a stronger sense of equity and how equity runs through their own content area, how educational justice and racial equity runs through their content, I think is essential. So those are kind of the, I'd say, recruitment sort of in the middle of pre-experiences and then the experiences in the program. I appreciate the contrast between that intentionality and, Michelle, what you said earlier, the kind of taking a percentage of a percentage of a percentage approach that is the default if we're not intentional, right? If 80% of our teachers are white women and then we take a percentage of our teachers and put them in the instructional coach pipeline and then take a percentage of our instructional coaches and put them in the school administrator pipeline, we're going to end up with almost exclusively white women, white men, and not the diversity that certainly is present in our student population. Yeah, the other thing I think programs have to really take a strong look at is selection.
[19:49]
Michelle, do you want to take that? Because I think maybe that's where you were going next.
[19:54] Keith Young:
That's what I was going to say is that now you've got this great, say, pretty diverse pool. Just because you have a diverse pool does not necessarily you have a diverse pool of individuals who are going to be able to move forward. effectively into a leadership position. So what do I mean by that? You can have a really wonderful set of folks who maybe three years from now might be great, but they're not quite at that level of readiness. And so the selection processes that universities use are also really important.
[20:26]
And there are a number of different strategies that folks are using, everything from an assessment center or assessment day. Anne and I, when we were at the University of Texas, we went into people's classrooms. We looked at how they were teaching because one of the kind of theories of action that we had was that if you weren't an effective teacher and you weren't paying attention to equity in the classroom yourself, How would you be able to supervise a teacher to do that? So there are a number of things that are like that you would want to have as part of your process of determining, you know, who at this point in their career is at a level of readiness to benefit the most from this program? Because you have to take into consideration our programs are just a slice of time. They're like an intense learning opportunity.
[21:18]
But they are finite in time. They're finite in terms of the resources that they provide. So you want to make sure that the people you're putting in there are going to leave and have the greatest impact in schools.
[21:28] Justin Baeder:
I do want to touch back on one other piece about selection, because I just feel like We can't move on without it. And that is you have to look at your selection process and discover whether or not it is inclusive. Each year, we have a group of our leaders who identify as Black, Indigenous, a person of color. We have them take a look at our interview questions. We have them look at our rubric so that we can get some feedback about questions that have been triggering. We've changed our first question, which used to be, tell us about your pathway to leadership and how you got here.
[22:00]
And people just repeated their resume. And so changing that question to a more open question, when did you first see yourself as a leader? When did others see you as a leader? We've heard about aunts and uncles and cousins and brothers and sisters and people bringing their family now. into the interview, which is a much more inclusive space than just repeating your resume. So I think the questions you ask are really important.
[22:22]
And then being ready for people not to be particularly good at being interviewed. We've had a couple of our candidates who completely broke down. And when we went back and said, talk to us about what happened, as you're driving to the University of Washington, if all you can think of is that you are the first person in your family who could possibly be entering into the University of Washington because we used to have racial restrictions. And so having to carry that weight into an interview and just understanding that if someone doesn't do well in the interview, we just interview them again, but not a formal interview. We just have a conversation. And some of those moves, being able to say, We're going to be a more inclusive program, even in the way that we select has helped us tremendously.
[23:05]
I'll just say, you know, Danforth has gone from about 25 to 30% of our students identifying as a person of color to 50 to 60%. And this is in a state where 70% of the people identify as white. But it's been all of those things. And when we talk to other programs, it's not just Danforth that's doing it. When we talk to other programs, it's similar, that they are really being thoughtful and intentional about what does the selection process look like and how their selection process might need to change. I think that's so important because one of the things that I try to impress upon candidates is that the hiring process for administrators is set up as a tournament, right?
[23:40]
You have lots and lots of applicants, typically far more applicants than you can handle. So you have to whittle the numbers down, just like March Madness, you're narrowing down this large number of candidates to just a single person who's ultimately going to get the job. And those tournaments have hidden rules, right? They have secret rules for how you win them. Writing letters or getting other people to write letters for you is one of those hidden rules that advantages certain people. And certainly, if those hidden rules can either be made more explicit or just replaced with, frankly, processes that are better at identifying promising candidates, then we're going to do a lot better at successfully recruiting people and not putting them through a gauntlet that leaves them out for reasons that nobody really decided on purpose.
[24:25]
So for districts that are looking to redesign their leadership pipeline, their preparation and recruitment process, what can that process look like for them in terms of partnering with a university-based preparation program to develop that leadership pool?
[24:41] Keith Young:
I think that's where the relationship that is developed through that partnership can really be helpful. So thinking about the strengths that both organizations in the partnership bring, and there are opportunities perhaps in those conversations with district and universities together to look at hiring process, right? Just what you're saying. So how might we do this? How might we be thought partners for one another to dismantle some of the barriers that aren't working and to recreate, reimagine, redesign opportunities together? But I think that can be done because you're bringing people from different organizations who are going to bring different perspectives and allow us to bring in another organization, right?
[25:22]
Allows somebody from the outside who's connected, but they're a little bit enough outside that they can start to say, why is that the way it is? And why might that be? Just to do little pushes and nudges and invite people then to shift. It's change is hard and it requires some humility, but that opportunity for partnership and trusting partnership, I think can push the collective in a more promising direction.
[25:44] Keith Young:
We like to think of it, Justin, as two heads are always better than one, right? So if I'm thinking about, we need our candidates when they're in their internship experience to have a really strong opportunity to observe teachers and provide feedback. You know, there are many, many, many ways that you could go about doing that. But what I think, based on my experience in schools many years ago, or reading the literature, might be quite different than what a principal and or superintendent assistant superintendent might have in mind, kind of based on the processes that they actually use in their schools and districts. So then the two of us coming together, me thinking about what the leadership standards are and what the cutting edge research says, and them thinking about like what is possible and what it is that they do and what they're hoping for.
[26:36]
to achieve through their feedback loop experience, we come up with a so much better experience for a candidate than we could if I was designing it by myself or if they were designing it by themselves.
[26:49] Justin Baeder:
Yeah, so definitely this is a partnership approach, and there is quite a bit of extremely specific guidance in the book. And I should say this is a substantial volume for anyone who is involved in this work of redesigning ed leadership preparation programs. Just to kind of wrap things up, Michelle, Anne, and Katie, what would you say are some of your ultimate hopes for where this work leads? Every child, every student, P-12, has a...
[27:17]
learning experience in schools that honors who they are as their true and authentic selves. And that's because the leaders in their building, every school has the leader that can pull that environment together.
[27:30] Keith Young:
I think that we know from our practice, we know from research that the nexus of universities and districts working together to build future teachers and future leaders and future counselors, et cetera, et cetera, is really important. the kind of most promising way of moving forward. And so what we're trying to do is help universities and district partners to some degree, make that shift from imagining that it is the job of just higher ed to develop future leaders for schools, that there are significant, important responsibilities higher education has, but it absolutely must be done in partnership with K-12 schools.
[28:18] Keith Young:
One of my hopes, in addition to what Anne and Michelle just noted, is that through design and not just reading about the design redesign process, but engaging with some of it and embracing it, is that it engenders an enthusiasm for improvement. And that it's an opportunity for a program to help people become even better at the talents that they bring with them into the program. So then they can also lift up the talents of their teachers and staff and then in turn their students. But I hope that there is an enthusiasm for the opportunities that improvement, despite it being challenging, can bring about.
[28:58] Justin Baeder:
Absolutely. And really, this is what we ultimately ask teachers to do, right? Rather than say, oh, I wish I had better students. I wish I had students who could do the work. Like, if we don't accept that kind of thinking from teachers, we say, your students are who they are, and it is your job to figure out how to get them to the point where they're capable of doing the work. And I think when it comes to the applicant pool, the candidate pool, and the kinds of leaders we want to...
[29:21]
graduate to take on these roles, we've got to take responsibility for creating the conditions where those transformations can take place. So the book is Redesigning Educational Leadership Preparation for Equity, Strategies for Innovation and Improvement. Michelle Young, Anne O'Doherty, and Katie Cunningham, thank you so much for joining me on Principal Center Radio. It's been a pleasure.
[29:42] Announcer:
Thanks for listening to Principal Center Radio. For more great episodes, subscribe on our website at principalcenter.com slash radio.
