Implementing webfolios in school leadership internships: "pluses  (Page 2/6)

North carolina context

The Department of Public Instruction in North Carolina, like several other states, has begun to integrate the components of the Framework for 21 ^st Century Learning within the public school curriculum ( Partnership for 21st Century Skills , 2004) and its standards for evaluating school leaders. With these new standards, Institutions of Higher Education in North Carolina have been required to revise their principal preparation programs to not only meet the usual national standards but to also prepare future leaders to integrate these 21 ^st century learning skills. One innovation for North Carolina university systems will be the development and implementation of webfolios portfolios in the revisioning of their principal preparation programs.

East Carolina University (ECU) is the largest producer of school leaders in North Carolina. Its output is critical to the state due to its geographic location east of the I-95 corridor where the majority of school districts are rural with high levels of poverty and a growing number of English language learner students (NCDPI, 2007). Upon graduation, most of the students enrolled in ECU’s principal preparation program return to their local districts. In conjunction with the North Carolina Department of Public Instruction’s (NCDPI) focus on revisioning principal preparation programs, ECU has added an additional assessment tool – the use of webfolios that contain evidences and artifacts of graduates’ proficiency at the pre-service level for school leaders. Incorporating portfolios as evidence of student outcomes that align to state and national education standards is a widely used approach to meet the accreditation requirements of programs and institutions (Strudler&Wetzel, 2005). For North Carolina’s universities, the requirement of program webfolios per student will be a mandate in the near future. In anticipation of the program webfolio requirement the faculty in the principal preparation program at ECU initiated the use of webfolios fall 2007.

At ECU, as in many institutions, internship portfolios have been used to house artifacts that make connections to standards and student learning (Strudler&Wetzel, 2005). Therefore, the internship was a logical place for the initial integration of webfolios due to the fact that a portfolio was an existing requirement that could seemingly become an electronic folio. In addition, the internship had requirements for students that called for collections of artifacts and evidences that met the North Carolina School Executive Standards.

This descriptive study presents the initial implementation process of selecting and using a webfolio for a principal preparation internship. In addition the evaluation of the implementation for the academic years 2007-08, 2008-09, and 2009-10 will be described.

Method

Sample

Faculty (n=12) supervising interns and all interns (n=279) for the school years 2007-08, 2008-09, and 2009-10 used TaskStream for their webfolio. A supervising faculty member was selected to coordinate the development and implementation process for the program. The year-long internship was completed during the final year in the Masters of School Administration (MSA) program.