Focusing on Students to Develop Justice Leaders

• In Event: Developing Justice Leaders: High-Impact Strategies in Leadership Preparation

Abstract

Purposes. This study explores the role of an atypical curricular practice within leadership preparation. While attention to minoritized and underserved students in aggregate is common in strong leadership preparation (Young, O’Doherty & Cunningham, 2022), a focus on particular students is not. This study addresses the question: How might a focus on specific students impact candidates’ development as anti-racist, justice-oriented leaders?

Perspectives. Exemplary educational leadership preparation programs (ELPPs) are grounded in a desire to serve all students and organize themselves to try to do so (Young, O’Doherty & Cunningham, 2022; Jacobson & Pounder, 2015). Many include some form of equity-driven action as a cornerstone of their curriculum (Reames, 2010; Perez et al., 2011; Cosner et al, 2015). Yet even the best have not figured out how to develop leaders who can achieve the results we need (DeMatthews, Kotok & Serafini, 2020).
This study presents two HIPs that focus candidates directly on students: ELL Shadowing and Strategic Inquiry. In ELL Shadowing (Soto, 2012, 2021), each candidate follows a multilingual learner throughout an entire day. In Strategic Inquiry (Author 2, 2013), candidates identify and close gaps between teacher practices and individual students’ needs. This study explores whether adding a focus on specific students to leadership preparation can help produce leaders with the skills and habits needed to serve all students.

Methods. Participants were 20 candidates in a university-district partnership for leadership preparation from 2018-2019. Data included work products; CPS self-assessments (see paper 1); field notes; and semi-structured interviews focused on who the participants were when they entered the program, who they became as leaders, and what in the program made the difference. Data were analyzed qualitatively in the tradition of grounded research (Charmaz, 2000; Corbin & Strauss, 1998) using axial coding or a start list (Kendall, 1999).

Results. Findings suggest that a focus on specific students created “Aha!” experiences that changed and developed the participants as equity leaders. For example, a clear vision of the disconnect between specific students’ needs and current practices – seen starkly through the focus on individual students during inquiry - prompted an “Aha!” for one participant. “We simply aren’t teaching what they need,” he said. “And if we don’t stop and do it, who will?” Another was shocked to see through ELL Shadowing that a multilingual learner who was successful in his music class was silent the rest of the day. When during the debrief he learned this was a pattern, he was outraged, and suddenly aware of both how the larger system operated to constrain student success and how he and other music teachers might dismantle and improve it.

Significance. Overall, findings suggest that when added to the more typical aspects of a strong leadership preparation curriculum, a focus on students may develop a different kind of leader – one who sees and challenges limiting assumptions about the ability of all students to learn, and who sees their own role and new options for change within a larger system that has maintained the status quo.

Author

• Helen A. Panero, Hunter College - CUNY