RES 5080-375,376

Data-Driven School Leadership

Spring 2014

Dr. George H Olson,
Instructor

Syllabus

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Meeting Times: This is (mostly) a fully, asynchronous ONLINE course

Dates: January 13 to March 28 , 2014 (See explanation for the shorter calendar, below)

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 21^st 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.

• Identify useful and important sources of data for school leadership decision making.
• Use Excel to manipulate, summarize. and perform simple statistical analysis of data.
• Select from the data appropriate indicators of achievement and progress and relate these to the goals and objectives set forth by the school and district.
• Develop effective evaluation guidelines consistent with the National Evaluation Standards.
• Develop effective data-collection procedures, including the selection and development of appropriate instrumentation.
• Process evaluation data and analyze evaluation results.
• Report evaluation findings to a variety of audiences and stakeholders.

Course Components

This is a fully online course and will be conducted asynchronously. There will be a few designated periods for virtual face-to-face meetings--usually via the AET Zone (Open Qwaq), but occasionally, as needed for smaller virtual meetings, via Skype, Google Talk, or other conferencing software. A virtual room has been provided in the AET Zone for students to meet and conference with each other. Students will be kept engaged by responding to several prompts, using the Data-based Educational Leadership ning (more on this below)  throughout the semester. The prompts are designed to elicit meaningful and thoughtful dialog among students (and the instructor) about individual course units.

Submitting Work

All required work is to be submitted via email or through the Data-based Educational Leadership ning. 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.

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.

Data-based Educational Leadership ning

You should have received (or will shortly receive) an invitation to join the Data-based Educational Leadership ning. This is a third-party platform that I use for discussion forums in this class. What is posted on the ning is visible only to me and members of the ning. When you sign into the ning, make sure that you take care to remember your long-in information (log-in email address and the password you choose). I do not have access to the password you create, so I will not be able  to provide it to you later.

Under the first assignment in the Calendars and Assignments you will find additional information detailing my expectations for your responses and postings to the ning. Read that section carefully.

Contributions to Class Discussions

Your contributions to class discussions are an important ingredient for this class. We can all learn from each other (that includes me). We will all gain much from reading and replying to each other's responses to the prompts on the ning. I hope that the discussions will be lively. You do not have to agree with me, or with each other. However, your comments should always be carefully considered and crafted. It has been my experience that, after a brief time, students enjoy the shared discussions.

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.).

Why the Shorter Calendar for Spring 2014?

Several students in this course (and other courses) are close to graduation. Because of a new state law, if these students wait until May to complete their coursework, they will lose out on the opportunity to be compensated at a higher rate for having principal licensure. For this reason, the College of Education, with the cooperation of the Graduate School, has agreed to streamline those courses with students in this situation. RES 5080 is one of those courses. While not everyone in both sections of this course, this semester, I thought it best, given the cross-section participation, of students in the two sections, to keep the two sections synchronized. Therefore, this course will complete by the end of March.

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