42 INVITED CHAPTERS
providing mentoring and feedback, but the responsibility and initiative for personal
development remains largely with the individual.
Leadership development—learning opportunities on the job in structured programs and
informal interactions—can foster essential skills of operating in organizations, with context-
specific experiences, challenges, and feedback (Mumford, Marks, Connelly, Zaccaro, &
Reiter-Palmon, 2000). Work experiences provide opportunities to understand an
organization’s norms and goals and to develop technical and leadership skills associated with
the organization’s work. Leadership development involves experiences such as executive
coaching (Kampa-Kokesch & Anderson, 2001), evaluation and feedback systems
(Chappelow, 1998), mentoring (Sosik & Lee, 2002), and developmental job assignments
(Day, 2001).
Leadership education complements personal development and leadership development
with formal university coursework associated with a degree or licensure program. Here, the
focus is typically on developing and integrating candidates’ knowledge and enculturation into
professional norms and practices.
Implications for university programs. While state licensing standards and university
cultures have encouraged design of university programs in school leadership as separate from
prior on-the-job experience (Muth, 1995), the content needed in university programs depends
greatly on the extent to which leadership development and personal development have
occurred prior to admission. When university programs are unable to count on any consistent
level of district-based leadership development before admission, the curriculum naturally
emphasizes applied skills and clinical experiences that will support performance of the
practical aspects of principals’ jobs (Murphy, 2007). But because the most licensing
programs are relatively short, it is unlikely that a university program, no matter how
comprehensive and profound its clinical experiences, can ever replace even a fraction of the
on-the-job learning that is central to contemporary conceptions of leadership development
within organizations (McCauley & Van Velsor, 2004).
On the other hand, if district-university partnerships could be developed that ensured
systematic attention to on-the-job leadership development, then university programs could
focus more on knowledge and how it is structured than on practical skills and how they are
applied. If such a change were possible, it would allow universities to emphasize each
candidate’s development and synthesis of professional knowledge and their motivation to
engage with that knowledge in transformative ways. In other words, being more modest in
our claims about the role of university programs might allow us to fulfill our roles more
effectively. Doing this in partnership with districts could ensure more comprehensive
preparation for the principalship and increase public confidence in the new capabilities that
practitioners bring to their local positions.
Formally sharing responsibility for principal preparation with school districts suggests two
directions for university programs, one structural and the other curricular. Structurally, the
challenge would be to fashion very different partnerships than we now have in most
preparation programs. Of course, collaborations with school districts are a familiar part of
many preparation programs, with participation in selection of candidates, shared instruction,
and even in customizing curriculum for cohorts of students (Barnett & Muth, 2003). But
these joint efforts typically focus only on the formal principal preparation program, without
addressing the leadership development that occurs on the job prior to entering the university.
A partnership that engaged the district and university in supporting leadership preparation in
both institutions over several years could support breadth of practical leadership experience
prior to entry into a licensure program and greater integration of conceptual and applied