This chapter focuses on the unique challenges of performance assessment in the field of educational leadership. In Teacher Preparation programs, authentic assessment is challenging but doable. If you want to know if someone can teach, you should not ask them to write an essay about what lesson they would create given a set of materials and learning objectives. You should actually give them the materials, have them teach, and assess that performance. In Educational Leadership, true performance assessment is much more challenging. If we want to know if someone can lead, it is difficult to find a situation where she/he can lead and then have trained assessors evaluate her/his performance in that situation. And what products could be captured from that performance?
This chapter addresses these challenges by outlining four interconnected phases for developing a performance assessment, involving twelve steps: Design (prioritizing the skill domain, choosing an assessment activity, choosing a product from that activity, brainstorming the characteristics of a good product, formulating those characteristics into a rubric, and setting benchmarks for the rubric), evaluation (piloting the assessment, and applying the rubric to a small number of students), implementation (training assessors, and applying the rubric to all students), and program development (evaluating the results, and returning to step #1). A specific example of these steps is provided, and the role of performance assessment in reconsidering the domain of knowledge/skills/dispositions for educational leadership is discussed.
This module has been peer-reviewed, accepted, and sanctioned by the National Council of Professors of Educational Administration (NCPEA) as a significant contribution to the scholarship and practice of education administration. In addition to publication in the Connexions Content Commons, this module is published in the
International Journal of Educational Leadership Preparation, Volume 4, Number 4 (October – December 2009). Formatted and edited in Connexions by Theodore Creighton, Virginia Tech.
Introduction
Concerns around the quality of public education have always been a part of the history of the US, but they have been intensifying over the past couple of decades. With these concerns, the demands for accountability have grown: first in K-12 and now in post-secondary education (Fritschler et. al., 2008). Accountability refers to reviewing the quality of educational programs and holding them to standards of quality through a series of sanctions and/or rewards.
Appropriately, the quality standards that drive accountability in education have been grounded in student learning. So, across all the academic and professional fields, there has been a tremendous amount of work defining what students should know and be able to do. In the field of Educational leadership, this domain of knowledge and skills is encapsulated by the Educational Leadership Constituent Council (ELCC) standards (Wilmore, 2002).
