Teaching, Research, Service and… Practice?
Friday, September 3, 2010 at 7:12PMFor years, UCEA programs have debated about who should be teaching and preparing future leaders. Conversations highlight the practical experiences of practitioners and the research and content expertise of regular faculty. However, the idea that regular tenure track faculty’s contributions are limited to their scholarship and content areas is debatable as is the idea the practitioners’ contributions are limited to their leadership experiences.
Interestingly, these are not directly reflective of conversations in other professional fields. Let’s take medicine as an example. I was recently talking with a number of deans of nursing schools about this issue and learned something very interesting.
In nursing schools and medical schools, faculty members have job responsibilities in four potential areas: research, teaching, service and practice. Like in a typical UCEA institution, faculty can negotiate how much time will be spent on each job responsibility area. For some, the focus may be more on research or teaching, and for some, it may be a teaching and practice or research and practice. However, practice is viewed as an important part of the professional work a faculty member does on behalf of the field. In nursing, for example, faculty members spend a certain amount of time practicing their area of expertise (e.g., anesthesiology), keeping their skills as fresh as their knowledge base and bringing their practical experience to bear in their teaching and research.
Is this even possible in education? Schools serve a set group of students and teachers and their work is long term, while the work of a nurse or doctor involves a larger rotation of patients. Thus, while nursing faculty may find it fairly seamless to assist with surgeries every Thursday, it might be more difficult to find an appropriate practice setting for a professor of educational leadership. However, it certainly isn’t impossible. Arrangements could potentially be made for faculty to do this at either the school or district level, taking responsibility for certain programs or projects, serving in a consultant capacity, carrying out the work of educational leadership.
When UCEA was located at the University of Missouri, then Dean Richard (Dick) Andrews implemented his version of John Goodlad’s “simultaneous renewal” of universities and schools through the Missouri Partnership for Educational Renewal (MPER)-the idea being that, districts and the universities would learn, grow, and mutually benefit from their partnership. Would it be possible to further enhance partnerships like MPER by stretching the notion of renewal to include faculty members practicing their area of expertise in a school or district setting?
Models faculty work load provided by nursing and medical schools may hold some interesting possibilities for university preparation programs. I would value having conversations with members of the educational community about this idea, its potential, how and where we might pilot something of this nature, and if like this is already happening.
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Reader Comments (10)
After almost a decade in higher education I had the unique opportunity to take a years leave of absence from my university post to serve as an interim administrator in a large urban school district. That year of administrative practice did much to help me reflect on my knowledge, my teaching, my curriculum resources, and my perspectives on educational leadership and preparation. I can't imagine a better "professional development" activity for those who work in colleges of education than returning to the field for an authentic opportunity to practice.
Many of our colleagues in UCEA have taken a semester, year or more as opportunities to serve in practice at school or district levels. In a couple of examples with which I'm familiar, one land-grant and one non-public, religious IHE, both with service missions, loaned leadership faculty to area public schools, which were having trouble finding leaders and/or other issues requiring change leadership. And there are more examples revealed in a smattering of literature from professors in our field who've taken these opportunities and then reported on the effects of these experiences on their teaching, research, as well as on the schools in which they were involved. As much as these cases exist, UCEA's open discussion of such hasn't been easy to access. Seems like those of us who've done this have had rich "hallway" conversations, but formalized attempts to bring this to conferences and other venues haven't been that successful. Definitely, it's past time for this discussion to occur.
For many years, the U of Utah's Dept of Ed Leadership & Policy has employed Boyer's model of scholarship for its retention, promotion, and tenure criteria --- i.e. scholar-researcher, scholar-teacher, scholar-citizen, and scholar-practitioner. This model recognizes contributions as a practitioner and/or to practitioner organizations or audiences.
I would hope that individuals guiding and shaping school leaders would have the desire to experience school leadership as part of their learning experience. It may come before or after they have secured a post, but it should come at some point.
There is a similar debate being had regarding school administrators teaching a class every so often to remember what it is like to be a teacher. I think this is important, which is why I volunteer to teach lessons in our school. It gives me insight into the teachers and their work that I would not get otherwise.
I can see how it would be just as important for professor to spend time in a school setting. There is a huge difference between talking about change and implementing change. In the trenches relevant, recent practical experience is critically important to have when educating our future school leaders.
FYI, there are a few comments about this over at my blog too:
http://bit.ly/bjggLP
Graduate programs in educational leadership do well by hiring experienced superintendents regularly to serve as adjunct professors. I'd bet these profs typically get good marks in their students' evaluations for the real-world applications they bring to their teaching. We've identified hundreds of supes who serve in these roles at local universities, and we plan to publish some articles about their experiences in the February '11 issue of our monthly magazine, The School Administrator. One superintendent admitted that he uses his teaching experiences at the university to identify top candidates for his school district's next administrative vacancies. Other superintendents have begun to teach graduate-level courses in the growing array of online doctoral programs in educational administration, which happens to be the subject of the September '10 issue of our magazine (see www.aasa.org if interested).
I agree wholeheartedly. Maybe there was once a day where what you knew about being an administrator had a long self-life, and things didn't change much, but that time is not now. In fact, most of the largest challenges in education are due to the lack of speedy response to change.
I am in an Ed. Leadership program where several of the professors are straight out of the Supt. or Principal's chair, and for now what they have to say and share is highly relevant. However, that relevance will wan quickly over the next few years, and they will need to reconnect again.
I think the same is true of teachers who become higher ed professors in teacher preparation. What is relevant their first few years will seem old and obsolete by the 5th or 6th, even with continuous research. When I was an undergrad, my methods teacher taught 1st and 2nd hour Honors class at the local high school before coming to the college to teach preservice teachers...best prof I had in teacher preparation, no surprises why.
In either case, the authenticity comes not from remembering the days, or knowing the theory, but in being connected to the day-to-day work that is administration or teaching. The two should be intimately locked.
Our preparation programs, like so many others, struggle with such contrary and conflicting forces right now. More and more it becomes clear that we need to rely on a blended faculty of tenure-track professors and expert practitioners for our certification programs. But the challenge is how to achieve this in an era of decreased funding. Frankly, an equally serious challenge is retaining faculty interest in and commitment to preparation programs (and the students) while facing enormous pressures to chase large grants and external funding. While this has always been the case to greater or lesser extents, in point of fact, faculty can no longer be casually engaged in their work in preparation programs as they were in the past. By "casually engaged" I mean that students could basically be admitted to the cert program, take the courses, and finished certification without needing (or having) any meaningful contact or interaction with University faculty (other than in the classes). This just cannot be the case any longer. There are new demands now that require time, effort, and attention and I worry about faculty willingness to assume these responsibilities as they become more apparent.
A research question regarding adjuncts:
My question is this:
Nationwide, what proportion of EdAd professors are adjunct professors?
In the typical educational leadership credential/certificate/degree program across the U.S., what percentage of the people teaching the students are adjuncts as opposed to full-time tenure-track professors?
I believe this to have significant impact on the nature and quality of assistant principal, principal, and superintendent preparation.
Thank you in advance for any information you may be able to share or for any direction you may be able to suggest in this search.