Leadership Development: The Larger Context
Developing individual
school leaders is just
a start. Meaningful
gains in student
achievement will
require whole-system
reform.
Michael Fullan
The common wisdom today is that school prin- cipals should be instruc- tional leaders. But most principals face a major
stumbling block—they don’t know
what instructional leadership means
or how to do it. For school leaders to
fulfill this role, leadership development needs to be job-embedded,
organization-embedded, and system-embedded. Few leadership development programs currently meet the
first of these successively rigorous
criteria, and almost no programs
meet the other two.
Job-Embedded Learning
Job-embedded school leadership
development consists of cultivating,
developing, and continuously
supporting individual leaders in real,
on-the-job settings. A 2009 study by
Darling-Hammond, Meyerson,
LaPointe, and Orr found that relatively few leadership development
programs have strong job-embedded
