0.1 1. performance is the new standard in the preparation of school  (Page 4/9)

University pre-service preparation to be a school administrator then became a graduate level exercise that mirrored the movement of the curriculum toward a more theoretical and academic approach that emphasized the cognitive knowledge related to the practice of school administration. Professors and university programs moved with the times to satisfy a perceived need to fit within the academy and to offer a more substantive academic curriculum to address the weaknesses of the prescriptive era of the previous fifty years (Murphy, 1992, p. 41). The thirty-four university programs in educational administration that became UCEA founding members were taking on the challenge to “improve graduate programs in educational administration through the stimulation and coordination of research, the publication and distribution of literature growing out of research and training activities, and the exchange of ideas” (Campbell, et al, 1987, p. 182).

For the past fifty years the field of educational leadership treated the applied nature of school administration as the handmaiden to the academic orientation that the field embraced during the 1950’s. Although the profession recognized the importance of the hands-on aspect of educational leadership, it also denigrated the stories, anecdotal experiences, and front line encounters of ex- administrators as colorful commentary and historical footnotes with little academic value within the higher education academy.

Thus, aspiring educational leaders memorized theories and learned the cognitive and scientific approach to leadership without an intentional or thoughtfully constructed experience that applied learning or required performance to complete, enhance, and complement well-constructed lectures that described and theorized about actual leadership within a school or school district.

An emphasis on academic learning at the expense of experiential learning contributed to the criticism of school leadership preparation. An invigorated focus on student learning and accountability for student performance led schools and districts to seek leaders who not only knew what to do but how to perform in demanding positions that required affective, behavioral, and hands-on skill.

Student performance

After fifty years of diminished credibility of a curriculum devoted to the applied nature of school administration, the field has once again embraced performance and experience . . . within an accepted academic epistemology. The problem-based, experiential, constructivist, and student-centered forms of pedagogy that place more of the responsibility for learning on the learner have been embraced as important curricular components within the educational leadership curriculum. The field of educational leadership entered a period in which it recognized the applied nature of the profession and used a broader definition of learning to complement academic with applied learning. This perspective, with ties to the intellectual work of Dewey (1959), Lewin (1951), Piaget (1958), Rogers (1969), Vygotsky (see Daniels, 2001), Lave&Wenger (1991), Kolb (1984) and others emphasizes “the central role that experience plays in the learning area” (Kolb, 1984, p. 20).