LDR - Teacher Leadership

This course introduces candidates to concepts, practices, and standards associated with professional service in schools as a teacher leader. Candidates explore several roles that teacher leaders may engage in, such as curriculum specialist, coach, mentor teacher, department chair or lead teacher, content specialist, or professional development consultant. They assess their own preparation, strengths, areas for cultivation, and context-based opportunities to grow as teacher leaders. Clinical experience hours required. Pre-requisite(s): None. Co-requisite(s): None. 2 semester hours

This course provides Teacher Leader candidates with tools to assess their own preparation, strengths, areas for cultivation, and context-based opportunities to grow as Teacher Leaders. It links candidates’ growth with aspects of their work environments to which they would most like to contribute. Each candidate constructs a model comparing the current reality of a particular problem situated in his or her school and the reality that would be more desirable, for problems that are within the candidate’s capacity to help bring about positive change Over the course, candidates recursively build out the model for positive action, identifying stakeholders in both realities and their shared incentives to make change, along with the steps and the players that would be needed to make change in realistic time frames. Candidates build negotiation and professional management skills as they study conflict, negotiation, collaboration, and change and systems theory. Pre-requisite(s): None. Co-requisite(s): None. 2-3 semester hours

This course helps teacher leaders make the transition from analyzing data pertaining solely to individual classroom decision-making to collaborating on and leading teams whose purpose is to understand data and its ramifications for the improvement of student performance across the school and districts. Honoring the relevance of both qualitative and quantitative data in school decision-making, the course equips candidates to read, analyze, and interpret in multiple ways both mandated and alternative forms of data and assessments, and to determine implications for action. It also offers instruction in the dynamics, challenges, and best practices of leading collaborative teams generally, including dealing effectively with conflict. Pre-requisite(s): None. Co-requisite(s): None. 2 semester hours

This course examines how mentoring and coaching improve the performance of teachers, students, schools, and the profession. It treats coaching not as about "fixing," but as joining with peers as fellow learners. Embracing the complexities of being both coach and colleague, candidates practice mentoring and coaching competencies, including, among others, examining beliefs and values that affect coaching, establishing trust, selecting a coaching model appropriate to the situation, and determining shared goals for a coaching relationship. Participants apply these competencies to real-world school contexts. Pre-requisite(s): None. Co-requisite(s): None. 2-3 semester hours

This course helps candidates construct partnerships with the community as more than classroom outreach. Candidates will learn to view community engagement as a means of not only building school culture and fostering collaboration, but also as a way to authentically embrace and respect students’ diverse home lives and backgrounds. Furthermore, this course encourages candidates to actively engage parents as partners in students’ learning experience, and to help students perceive themselves as active, contributing citizens to their immediate and farther-reaching communities. Candidates have the opportunity to plan, and to take first steps on, a community engagement project that involves several of the following: multiple stakeholders, a budget, a service learning component for students, and a recursive cycle of action, evaluation, and improvement.

This course guides teacher leaders to examine their values, beliefs, dispositions, and biases regarding their own cultural identity and that of others, while exploring a range of intersections of identities that may include perceived race, nationality, socio-economic status, gender identity and expression, sexual orientation, language, culture, ability status, and faith. Through course readings and guided field observations and activities, candidates develop a project that includes collaboration with other teachers and administrators to promote social justice and inclusivity at structural levels in their school environment.

This course prepares candidates for their roles in the professional development of fellow teachers in the group setting. Candidates study principles of adult education, including those the help grow teachers’ daily practice, thus improving student learning in their buildings. They explore the skills needed to successfully make the transition from supporting the learning of young students to working with one’s peers as well as administrators. They practice and receive feedback on their presentation skills and methods of engaging larger groups. They also explore methods for encouraging collective leadership in fellow teachers in activities such as running professional learning communities, as well as ways to integrate professional learning within the rhythms of the teaching day and week. Pre-requisite(s): None. Co-requisite(s): None. 2-3 semester hours

This course brings teacher leaders into contact with the larger trends and polices that impact classroom practices. It introduces them to the wealth of arenas beyond the individual classroom and/or school within which they might have influence or shape understandings of their profession and of the needs of students. It also introduces them to the budget decisions that school and district administrators face, as well as political and business processes that influence what happens in schools and classrooms. Candidates have the opportunity to design and carry out a project in which they empower their peers to identify and use research that will be useful in advocacy and to plan action on an issue affecting their schools and districts. Clinical experience hours required. Pre-requisite(s): None. Co-requisite(s): None. 2 semester hours

The first of three courses for the planning, execution, and evaluation of a Teacher Leadership Immersion Project, this course provides the opportunity for candidates to identify a teacher leadership problem or challenge facing their own school, district, or other teaching and learning system, and to design a strategy to join with others to address the problem. Candidates investigate relevant literatures from education, as well as business, politics, and other disciplines focused on complex change, as well as parallel issues and approaches taken by other schools and districts, and develop a proposal that will allow them to focus on one of the National Teacher Leader Standards in depth. With instructor approval of their project, they will begin identifying mentors, collaborators, and stakeholders, and begin active work on their projects. Pre-requisite(s): Completion of all Teacher Leadership endorsement coursework. Co-requisite(s): None. 3 semester hours

In this second of three courses for the planning, execution, and evaluation of a Teacher Leadership Immersion Project, candidates study change management challenges and case studies. They reflectively document a cycle of active work on their school-based project in accordance with the project proposal approved in LDR 591. They continue to consult, share, and critique the relevant professional literature. They also engage a larger professional community as mentors, colleagues, and professional peers as interlocutors on the systems, stakeholders, and issues they face and adapt what they learn from professional peers to their own contexts. They demonstrate deepening expertise in the National Teacher Leader Standard selected as their focus for their project. Pre-requisite(s): Completion of all Teacher Leadership endorsement coursework. Co-requisite(s): None. 3 semester hours

In this final of three courses for the planning, execution, and evaluation of a Teacher Leadership Immersion Project, candidates engage in iterative practices to improve their process of managing change and seek more effective results and deeper insights for future work as teacher leaders. They re-engage the professional literature and colleagues, not to begin the work but to address specific challenges they have faced. They present their work as cases to classmates and within the school/community, and plan for dissemination of their findings through publication, professional presentation, or other medium. Finally, they evaluate both the more and the less tangible results they have obtained, and identify next directions for their school-based project and for their own growth as teacher leaders. Pre-requisite(s): Completion of all Teacher Leadership endorsement coursework. Co-requisite(s): None. 3 semester hours