The Crowd in the Principal’s Office 43knowledge. This, in turn, could allow university programs to focus less on efforts to duplicate
on-the-job leadership opportunities through clinical experiences and more on other aspects of
the curriculum.
To develop such partnerships, we need a new round of boundary-crossing experiments
among school districts, education leadership programs, and teacher education departments.
For example, a jointly sponsored, ongoing “teacher leadership forum” could offer continuing
support as teachers gained experience across various leadership roles in a school and district.
If the university principal-education programs then built on these experiences rather than
replicating them with parallel coursework, new possibilities could emerge for the university
curriculum.
How might the university curriculum change if less focus on immediate practical skills
was required? One important possibility emerges from literature on development of expertise
across several content domains. Experts differ from novices in the extent to which their
personal knowledge is structured around critical concepts and theories in their field.
Structured knowledge affects both the possibilities people see in various situations and the
way they learn from their experience (Bransford & Schwartz, 1999; Chi, Feltovich, & Glaser,
1981; Chase & Simon, 1973).
This logic suggests that university programs could have a significant impact on principal
practice by developing a clear organizing structure for professional knowledge and arranging
preparation programs so that individual candidates begin using that structure in their own
thinking. Whatever their prior leadership experiences, principal candidates enter university
programs with a large store of informal knowledge and, often, strong biases that have been
built up over years of working in schools. By attending systematically to the way candidates
have learned to think about schools, university programs can help them develop knowledge
structures that are coherent and complete enough to support effective professional practice.
Engagement with a shared knowledge base can also help principal candidates understand
the professional context of their work and how professional commitments extend beyond the
interests of any particular school organization. This can strengthen individuals’ motivation to
develop as school leaders. Done systematically, such education could also help new members
of the profession develop a common understanding of mission, commitments, and history,
fostering continuity of purpose and strategy (Conger & Benjamin, 1999).
In previous writing with Colorado colleagues (Bellamy et al., 2007), I have suggested one
way to focus preparation on knowledge structures and expertise, using the nine school
accomplishments and the annual cycle of school leadership as knowledge structures and a
series of performance tasks that require candidates to integrate their prior experiences,
readings, reflections, clinical practice within these knowledge structures. The two
complementary approaches that we have recommended for framing principal practice were
designed to be both organizers for the profession’s knowledge and knowledge structures that
individual principals might develop in the course of a preparation program. Performance
assessments developed in conjunction with these structures could give faculty opportunities to
find out about how students have organized their thinking about leadership, and offer students
multiple opportunities to practice using a common approach as they make sense of
professional readings and reflect on practical experiences.
CONCLUSION
The boisterous crowd in the principal’s office creates a new and challenging context for
the school-leadership profession. Already under pressure to achieve short-term results in very