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Policymakers have focused on improving STEM outcomes for US high school students for over 50 years. Much of this focus has centered on improving the quality of STEM teachers, particularly in poor and minority schools. Few, if any, of these efforts have considered the importance of the content knowledge of those providing instructional leadership in schools – namely, principals and assistant principals. This chapter examines the percentage of school leaders with teacher certification in mathematics or science and the degree to which teacher and school leader turnover interrupts the leadership–teacher relationships. The study concludes relatively few school leaders have the content knowledge to provide deep instructional leadership. Moreover, the study finds combined teacher and school leader turnover greatly diminishes the sustained relationships between instructional leaders and teachers, particularly in lower-performing schools.

For the last decade, policy makers and boards of education have been mandating and searching for school leaders who are knowledgeable about curriculum and instruction or what the reform literature terms instructional leadership. The recognition that expertise in teaching and learning is critical to the achievement in our schools, however, has often been overwhelmed by the management functions of administration and programs in educational administration, which continue to support the role of manager, and provides little, if any, substance for the kinds of knowledge and skills necessary to lead a school instructionally. Recent studies of the instructional leadership contend that the content that has been neglected in the training of administrators is an understanding of subject matter and how an educational leader must transform the theories, ideas, and practices of a subject or discipline into the everyday understandings of classroom teaching. Although the new construct of Leadership Content Knowledge (LDK) provides a new understanding about what leaders need to know about teaching and learning in order to effectively perform the role of instructional leader, the studies of LDK have not yet provided a process for becoming a leader of content knowledge. The author describes a framework for how an educational administrator would become a “Leader of Content Knowledge.”

The team members’ expertise has been shown to increase team effectiveness when it is actively coordinated. While in face-to-face teams such expertise coordination unfolds through direct interaction, expertise coordination in dispersed teams is unlikely to evolve automatically. In this context, shared leadership, that is, the distribution of leadership influence across multiple team members is argued to serve as initiating mechanism for expertise coordination.

Leaders in health care today are faced with a wide array of complex issues. This chapter describes an innovative physician leadership development program at the Cleveland Clinic intended to enhance the leadership capacities of individuals and the organization. Propositions regarding the program's impact on organizational innovation, organizational commitment, social capital, and the human element of physician practice are offered for future examination.

Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) have a long history of diversity, equity, and inclusion. As we move through the twenty-first century, the color lines of persons working at and attending them is changing, creating a caramelizing of HBCUs. Therefore, this chapter identifies the challenges associated with the growing number of non-Black students and faculty at HBCUs. Furthermore, it uses the notion of “othermothering” to address those issues via ethic of care, advancement of culture, and guardian of the institute. Strategies include same- and other-race mentoring, service-learning projects, safe places for racial identity development, the divine nine, homecoming and bowl game awareness, autoethnography, HBCU e-learning series, and teaching support for teaching diverse student learners.

In this chapter, each of the completed models of curriculum is presented and evaluated using criteria from the attributes of effective curricula discussed in Chapter 1. Explanations of the design strategies that are used to demonstrate each attribute in a differentiated manner are included. The evaluation process provides an evaluation methodology to demonstrate the effectiveness of each model of a curriculum in a credible and trustworthy way.

In the previous chapters, the individual parts of the curricula were configured, aligned, and interconnected to deliver specific outcomes in each learning module. In this chapter, the components of each curriculum are assembled into one table to exhibit the order contained within each learning module within the overall curriculum. The standards for curricular attributes adopted at the beginning of the design process are the criteria for the evaluation of the completed curriculum. The strategies used to configure the components of each curriculum provide evidence of the curriculum’s characteristics, which demonstrate compliance with each criterion.

The evaluation of these attributes within a curriculum serves several purposes. First, they provide a checklist to guide the design process toward curricula that reflect these standards as developed by the profession of curriculum design in higher education. Second, they provide a measurement of the attributes of the curriculum to demonstrate the compliance of each curricular design with conventional standards. Third, these measurements can be compared with other institutional data to uncover correlations between the design assumptions and learner performance. These correlations often reveal unanticipated results, which inform the effectiveness of the instructional system.

These criteria are applied to the evaluation of the curriculum for each module to demonstrate the diverse manner in which each can be achieved in a discipline-specific manner. The compliance with these criteria is explained to be a matter of demonstration, as used in the discipline of qualitative research. These qualitative evaluations can then be compared with other operational data to understand the effectiveness of the design assumptions for each curriculum.

This chapter presents five differentiated models of curriculum, each designed with templates created from learning theories. The discipline of distributed leadership is chosen to develop a cognition-based curriculum, a behavior-based curriculum, a performance-based curriculum, a values-based curriculum, and collectively arranged into a competency-based curriculum. The research literature frames the attributes of a competency-based curriculum on psychological competence.

In this chapter, curricula are developed to demonstrate the process of adapting theories of learning, instruction, and environment into design templates with which to differentiate the dimensions and components of a curriculum. In these curricula, multiple conceptual frameworks are employed to translate the content and structure of the discipline into instructional objectives, instructional engagement, instructional experience, and instructional environment to align the instructional processes with the intended learning. For these demonstrations, the discipline of organizational leadership is chosen due to the multidimensional structure of this discipline and the opportunities it presents to differentiate the curriculum and learning. Each component of the curriculum adapts an appropriate framework to align and interconnect the instructional processes into an optimized learning experience. The result is curricula that have a coherent flow horizontally across the components for each outcome as well as interconnectedness vertically between the outcomes. This approach creates coherence, alignment, and interconnectedness to the curricula and order to the learning process for the learners.

This methodology is applied to design the curriculum for five instructional modules. Module 1 focuses on dualistic thinking developed through a cognition-based curriculum. Module 2 presents a multiplistic learning experience through a behavior-based curriculum. Module 3 presents relativistic learning through a performance-based curriculum. Module 4 delivers complex learning through a values-based curriculum. Module 5 compiles these four modules into a competency-based curriculum model.

Each of these modules employs a unique set of theories to configure the components of the curricula to reflect the structure of each discipline. The use of each theory is explained and demonstrated in the design process.