0.4 O'hern, b., schaming mcniff, s., brogan, b., & D’onofrio-de  (Page 7/11)

Philosophy and the use of a professional seminar course

In order to provide students with a common ground on which to understand the philosophy and standards that drive our leadership programs, all students are required to take a seminar course titled Seminar in School Leadership. The seminar course is aligned directly with the Interstate School Leaders Licensure Consortium (ISLLC) standards and the Widener University Center for Education’s Conceptual Framework.

The seminar course has as its focus the six ISLLC standards of Vision, School Culture, Management, Collaboration, Ethics and the Larger Context of Education. When studying the Vision standard, course content is related to developing, communicating, implementing and evaluating a vision for a school or a school district. The School Culture standard is involved with the leader’s ability to create an environment conducive to learning for both students and staff and to have in the school or district a focus on teaching and learning. Students explore as part of their work on this standard ways to value the diversity in the school and community. The School Management standard lends itself to working with students to understand all facets of school management and how to effectively manage a building, a program or a district. In this course, students work on real problems through the use of case studies to assist with the development of their collaboration and communication skills (Collaboration standard). The Ethics standard states that school leaders must treat all members of the school community with dignity, fairness and respect. This topic is prevalent throughout the work with all the standards. Finally, students must gain an understanding and awareness of the Larger Context of Education including the social, political, economic and legal aspects of society that have a great impact on education.

An assessment system has been developed for this course to assess students’ knowledge, skills and dispositions related to the standards. To provide evidence of an initial awareness and in-depth understanding of the standards, students write an interpretation of each of the standards, develop an artifact related to the particular standard, and then write a reflection that provides the rationale for the artifact. Throughout the course, this author gives feedback to the students on their interpretations, artifacts, and reflections.

Student feedback on their work with the standards is given through the use of rubrics developed for each standard. The rubrics are aligned with the Center for Education’s Conceptual Framework values of academic excellence, collaboration, diversity and lifelong learning, and the commitments to best practices and the use of technology.

It is also the intention of the instructor that throughout the course students will begin to develop their leadership philosophy as they work with the standards. One of the required readings for the course is Leading with Soul (Bolman and Deal, 2001). This particular book was chosen because of the authors’ lessons on thinking about the “human side” of leadership. Class discussions of this particular book have shown students’ ability to use higher level thinking skills and to examine their own values and beliefs so that they can then form their leadership philosophy based not only on the standards but also on their personal values. Students are given the opportunity to work on personal growth projects related to the knowledge gained through the study of the book.