RES 5080-375

Data-Driven School Leadership

Fall 2013

Dr. George H Olson,
Instructor

Syllabus

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Meeting Times: This is a fully, asynchronous ONLINE course

Dates: August 20, 2013 to December 13, 2013

Required textbook: At this point, there is no required text for this course. Instead you will be assigned several articles to read. I am currently reviewing several possible textbooks, and may assign one later.

Rational    

At the end of 2006, the North Carolina State Board of Education approved a sweeping set of standards that prospective local school executives are required to meet. In its new vision of school leadership, the Board emphasized that, “The successful work of the new executive will only be realized in the creation of a culture in which leadership is distributed and encouraged with teachers, which consists of open, honest communication, which is focused on the use of data, teamwork, research-based best practices [italics added], and which uses modern tools to drive ethical and principled, goal-oriented action.” (North Carolina Standards for School Executives)  Several of the standards described in that document have components that are germane to the new course proposed here.

Standard 2:  Instructional Leadership

Ensures that there is an appropriate and logical alignment between the curriculum of the school and the state’s accountability program.

Creates processes for collecting and using student test data and other formative data from other sources for the improvement of instruction.

Creates processes for identifying, benchmarking and providing students access to a variety of 21st century instructional tools (e.g., technology) and best practices for meeting diverse student needs.

Creates processes to provide formal feedback to teachers concerning the effectiveness of their classroom instruction.

Standard 3:  Cultural Leadership

Communicates strong ideals and beliefs about schooling, teaching, and professional learning communities with teachers, staff, parents.

Influences the evolution of the culture to support the continuous improvement of the school as outlined in the school improvement plan.

Standard 4:  Human Resource Leadership

Uses the results of the Teacher Working Conditions Survey to create and maintain a positive work environment for teachers and other staff.

Evaluates teachers and other staff in a fair and equitable manner and utilizes the results of  evaluations to improve performance.

In addition, the Board’s document listed several competencies that they determined school executives need to implement the standards. Among these are the following, all of which are supported by the proposed new course.

Environmental Awareness – Becomes aware and remains informed of external and internal trends, interests and issues with potential impacts on school policies, practices, procedures and positions.

Judgment – Effectively reaching logical conclusions and making high quality decisions based on available information. Giving priority and caution to significant issues.  Analyzing and interpreting complex information

Results Orientation – Effectively assumes responsibility.  Recognizes when a decision is required. Takes prompt action as issues emerge. Resolves short-term issues while balancing them against long-term goals.

Systems Thinking – Understands the interrelationships and impacts of school and district influences, systems and external stakeholders, and applies that understanding to advancing the achievement of the school or team.

Course Objectives

    This course is primarily for school administrators. At the completion of this course, the student should know and be able to do the following.

Course Components

This is a fully online course and will be conducted asynchronously. There will be no fixed periods for virtual face-to-face meetings. That said, however, there will be opportunities for synchronous small-group, virtual meetings using Skype, Google Talk, or other conferencing software. Additionally, a virtual room will be provided in Telaplace for students to meet and conference with each other. Students will be kept engaged by responding to several prompts (using ning.com or a similar platform) throughout the semester. The prompts are designed to elicit meaningful and thoughtful dialog among students (and the instructor) about individual course units.

The course consists of eight units distributed over 14-15 virtual sessions. The units, along with their rational, are described below. More specific guidelines and instructions are found under Calendar and Assignments.

 

Contributions to Class Discussions

Submitting Work

All required work is to be submitted via email. Keep a copy! I sometimes get as many as 200 emails per day and some, occasionally get lost. All email related to this course should be submitted to Olsongh3@gMail.com. When submitting work via email be sure to include this key phrase on the subject line: "RES 5080-<section no.>" (where, of course, you substitute your course section number for <section no.>.

As graduate students and professionals, you are expected to be able to write clearly, using correct grammar and spelling, and sophisticated style. Writing is an important form of communication, especially among well-educated individuals. Clear and sophisticated writing is reflective of good education, personal care in expression, and respect for your instructors and peers. Poor or sloppy writing reflects none of these attributes and, for me anyway, is an affront. It is difficult and needlessly time-consuming to have to plod through writing that is poorly structured, unsophisticated, loosely connected, rambling, rife with misspellings, and/or grammatically incorrect.

A procedure I typically use, when reading submitted documents that are poorly written is to stop reading after I have encountered several egregious errors. When this happens, I return the work to the student, with comments, and request a complete re-write. I do this twice. If, after the second re-write, I still consider the work to be poorly written I proceed to score the work as best I can. However, since poorly written work is difficult to understand, the scores I assign are generally low.

 

Written work. 

As graduate students and professionals, you are expected to  write clearly, using correct grammar and spelling, and sophisticated style. Writing is an important form of communication, especially among well-educated individuals. Clear and sophisticated writing is reflective of good education, personal care in expression, and respect for your instructors and peers. Poor or sloppy writing reflects none of these attributes and, for me anyway, is an affront. It is difficult and needlessly time-consuming to have to plod through writing that is poorly structured, unsophisticated, loosely connected, rambling, rife with misspellings, and/or grammatically incorrect.

This program has adopted the APA Publication Manual as a standard of style for written work.

Evaluation of written work. A procedure I typically use, when reading submitted documents that are poorly written is to stop reading after I have encountered ten or so egregious errors. When this happens, I return the work to the student, with some commentary, and request a complete re-write. I do this twice. If, after the second re-write, I still consider the work to be poorly written I proceed to score the work as best I can. However, since poorly written work is difficult to understand, the scores I assign are generally low. Note, this applies to your Forum posts as well.

Because of my course load, I have only a limited amount of time to pre-read and suggest corrections for your written assignments. I have provided what I believe to be detailed instructions and rubrics for each of the assignments. However, if you need more direction or more information, feel free to ask.

Here are some suggestions that might help you improve the quality of your writing:

  1. Read, CAREFULLY, the chapter on style in the most recent version of the APA publication manual. Take the suggestions offered in that chapter seriously.

  2. As you write your manuscript, think carefully about each (and every) sentence you write. Does it convey, clearly, what you want it to convey? Is the sentence necessary (if not delete or revise it)? Does it repeat what you have written elsewhere? If it does, then if it does not elaborate or clarify what you have written earlier, delete it. There is no need to pad the dissertation.

  3. Think about the vocabulary you use. Are words (especially adjectives, adverbs, verbs, and nouns) the correct words for conveying the meaning you want? Pay particular attention to subject-predicate agreement (sometimes the subject is separated from the predicate by several words. In some cases, it may even help to roughly diagram your sentence) and to tense (generally, everything that has already occurred should be written in past tense). Consult a dictionary frequently!

  4. Carefully, and deliberately, re-read each paragraph. Use the same criteria you use when reading individual sentences.

  5. Once you have gone through the manuscript following these suggestions, repeat the process a second time.

  6. Have someone else read the manuscript out loud to you. Often, when you hear someone else read what  you have written, you will notice inconsistencies or detect sections in the manuscript that do not convey clear meaning.

 

Workload

This class carries a heavy workload. As a general rule, graduate students should be prepared to spend an additional 20 to 25 hours per credit hour doing outside work. Since this is a three-credit hour course. you should expect to spend 60 to 80 hours, this semester, doing outside work (readings, homework, papers, etc.).

NOTE: As the instructor, I reserve the right to change or modify this syllabus to meet the needs of the class.