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Instructional leadership has taken center stage in recent years as the emphasis on school leaders’ role in improving instructional programs and impacting student learning has increased under the pressures of the accountability movement. While there is a growing literature that has highlighted the indirect impacts of effective instructional leadership on student learning, little is known about these effects in the area of special education. Because this direct involvement in instructional and curricular matters has typically fallen outside the traditional roles of principals and other school leaders, the need for purposeful focus on developing these skills is paramount in a climate that is calling for leaders who can facilitate growth and improvement in student learning, particularly in the area of special education. This chapter explores instructional leadership in the context of special education with a focus on small to mid-sized schools. We identify a set of factors that are critical to the effective implementation of instructional leadership in the area of special education which include, communication, teacher evaluation and supervision, staff development, instructional programing, and instructional design. The chapter goes on to discuss how school leaders can cultivate growth and improvement in special education programming through the use of coaching models and distributed leadership. Lastly we explore the implications for practice including discussions of reforming principal preparation programs and shared leadership.

This chapter offers an integrated framework for the design of educational leadership preparation programs that situate disability in the vision of social justice leadership (SJL) and equity for all students. We examine the extent to which current standards for building-level administrators inform their ability to implement programs for students with disabilities. Utilizing Theoharis’ (2007) definition of social justice leadership (SJL), we propose a broader framework for SJL that accounts for students with disabilities and present four key components upon which the broader framework of SJL rests. We align the updated standards for building-level leaders with the professional standards for special education administrators and describe how the skill sets for special education leaders complement and inform the design of leadership preparation programs to support candidates’ ability to create, sustain, and implement programs that meet the needs of all children. Finally, we argue for an integrated framework of professional standards that provides a more comprehensive set of skills necessary for meeting the needs of each and every student in the school, and we provide recommendations for leadership preparation programs to achieve this integration.

In Ontario Canada, being a vice principal is not considered a career goal. Rather, school principals are drawn from the ranks of practising vice principals. Potential administrators must first pass the principal qualification program and spend several successful years in the interim position of vice principal (known as assistant principal, deputy principal, and assistant headmaster in other countries) before applying for the principalship itself. The current system appears to be replete with inherent challenges both for vice principals and the educational stakeholders they serve. Administrator training is based on a quantitative paradigm, but the vice principal role is highly qualitative in nature, requiring strong interpersonal skills to address conflict for which no training is provided. The current system addresses the dual role of management and leadership but from the perspective of the principal, not the vice principal. Training also favors management over leadership, yet hiring processes for vice principals place a high value on demonstrated leadership. Facility with ethical decision-making is central to the vice principal role yet absent from qualification programs. Qualification programs use classroom-based learning with no “in-role” field experience. Mentoring systems designed to provide new vice principals with help are inadequate for supporting daily tasks. As a consequence, newly appointed vice principals find themselves in a role for which they have not been trained.

Recognizing the need for a pool of diverse future administrators, the Los Angeles Unified School District entered into a partnership with the Department of Educational Leadership and Policy Studies at California State University, Northridge to prepare the next generation of leaders. The process to develop the program and produce the cadre of candidates is a study in the facilitation of the transition of educators from teachers to administrators. This chapter examines the issues encountered and the processes established to create a rigorous, accessible master's degree/Administrative Credential Program that met the needs of the students and the school district.

In this chapter, we provide an overview of the characteristics, content, procedures, processes, and outcomes of effective educator preparation programs for teachers of students with behavioral disorders (BD). We emphasize the need for teachers of students with BD to be fluent with the identification and application of evidence-based practices and discuss how teacher preparation programs best prepare these teachers for the challenges they will face in the classroom. The chapter includes an evaluation checklist for programs preparing educators to teach students with BD; this checklist lists critical competencies, content, and practices (e.g., implementation fidelity, collaboration, classroom management) that should be part of the training for all teachers of students with BD. In addition, we discuss future directions for the field and suggestions for increasing the effectiveness of teacher preparation programs that prepare teachers of students with BD.

This chapter examines the tensions inherent in conceptions of social justice as they relate to educational administrator preparation programs. In order to determine how social justice is conceptualized in K-12 administrator preparation in Ontario, Canada, we conduct a document analysis of publicly available information related to provincial leadership preparation programs. We identify an ideological bias toward managerial and transformational leadership paradigms which favor externally mandated outcomes that unintentionally reinstate hierarchical management paradigms and democratic forms of racism (Henry, Tator, Mattis, & Rees, 2000). Drawing on critical democratic and antiracist literature and our own research and practice, we propose an approach to leadership preparation that can support diversity and transformative praxis while working within a mandated transformational paradigm.

In this chapter, we describe the strategies used in establishing the Great Leaders for Great Schools Academy (GLGSA), a high impact and sustainable university–district partnership and the first program to be accredited under California’s experimental standards for principal preparation. The partnership has evolved into a robust professional learning community dedicated to the task of preparing practice-ready school leaders with the knowledge, skills, and dispositions needed to turn around low performing schools in the Pomona Unified School District. Chapter contents also include descriptions of the key elements of the GLGSA and seven recommendations for those who desire to establish innovative and collaborative approaches to leadership preparation.

This chapter presents a crosswalk of the International Society for Technology Standards for Administrators commonly referred to as NETS*A, the Interstate School Leaders Licensure Consortium (ISLLC) Standards for Administrators and the Educational Leadership Constituent Council (ELCC) Standards. This crosswalk will serve as a framework for a discussion of how the administrative standards have evolved to their current state and how administrators can best shift dispositions and knowledge and skills to get the maximum impact of technology in their standards-based leadership activities. The chapter finishes with practical advice as to how administrators can proceed to assess their environment and use appropriate technology to facilitate meeting the requirements of the revised standards.

Surprisingly, urban principals seldom learn transformative leadership in their administrator preparation programs, thus missing out on its value in redefining the moral and ethical imperatives to improve with effective leadership and teaching, poor and minority students’ academic learning outcomes and performance on NCLB-mandated high-stakes accountability tests for professional learning communities. This chapter historicizes contexts and analyzes kaleidoscopic reflections of newly practicing urban school principals to illuminate chaos that often forces them into survival-mode managing rather than leading transformatively with structural reforms, and to make them aware of “equity traps” resistant to leadership intent upon radically transforming schools into productive and socially just learning communities.

This chapter presents a rationale for the International Study of Principal Preparation, provides an overview of the study, offers descriptions of the assumptions that should underpin the pre-appointment experiences of school principals, and describes the context of the principalship. The chapter will close with commentary intended to assist and guide designers and providers of principal preparation programming.A central point of this chapter is that it is unlikely that a template for principal preparation can be designed for application in all settings. Indeed, attempts to create such a template are likely to result in culturally and educationally inappropriate approaches to leadership development and to ineffective principals. Instead, leadership development is best approached through a thoughtful and reflective awareness of a set of assumptions about leadership in cross-cultural settings and of the contextual variables impacting school leaders.