On Track 360º Research Base Flyer

Research Base for the

on track

360º

The On Track 360° for Successful 21st Century School Leaders

Productivity is never an accident. It is always the result of a commitment to excellence, intelligent planning, and focused effort.

Paul J. Meyer

was recently developed through a partnership between Dr. Larry Coble of Clemmons, North Carolina, and Dr. Katherine P. Divine of Jacksonville, Florida, whose previous collaborative work resulted in the development of a customized leadership assessment for the Schultz Center for Teaching and Leadership based on Florida Principal Leadership Standards. Dr. Coble served as content expert and Dr. Divine served as resident research and assessment specialist for the group of educators creating this programbased and developmental 360⁰ assessment for use with leadership programs serving Duval County Public Schools and surrounding counties in northeast Florida. The two formed a partnership that utilizes the strengths of each in educational leadership, research, and assessment design to recognize and articulate standards for leadership behavior defined by various state and national organizations. Both have more than 30 years of experience working with educational leaders in public school districts and at the university level. Their experience also enables them to develop customized tools for assessing and reporting on the development of competencies in leaders based on national, state, and local requirements.

It has become clear that today’s successful school leaders need to have a strong command of core knowledge, skills at managing change, and the capacity for leading groups in collaborative and inclusive ways. Baby-boomers are reaching retirement age in increasing numbers and school districts and states are faced with the need to develop a pipeline of able individuals ready to step into leadership roles in schools and school districts. Divine and Coble began by compiling a master set of leadership indicators in 2007. Since that time, they have reviewed numerous sources of research on leadership, organizational development, systems thinking, and change management as they relate to the challenges of educational leadership in the 21st Century. In combination with theoretical and content-based research, the partners have carried out numerous content analyses based on published taxonomies of leadership standards including those published by the Interstate School Leaders Licensure Consortium (ISLLC), the National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education (NCATE), the National Association of Elementary and Secondary School Principals (NAESP and NASSP), the Southern Regional Education Board (SREB), and emerging standards for the certification of principals from the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards. This crosssection of standards was further reviewed against meta-analyses conducted by the Mid-Continent Research Laboratory for Education and Learning (McRel) in 2005 and 2009, in which school and district leadership practices were identified that were found to be most influential on student achievement. Using this composite set of national standards as a backdrop, individually defined state standards for the expectations of school-based and district level leaders have also been reviewed for commonalities

Please contact us for more information: On Track Press, Inc. P.O. Box 157 Clemmons, NC 27012 336 712 3396 Larry D. Coble, Ed.D. lrrycble@bellsouth.net Katherine P. Divine, Ph. D. kpd1divine@aol.com

including Florida, Georgia, Mississippi, North Carolina, Ohio, and Michigan to date.

By using comparative analyses across these various frameworks from national and state sources, patterns have emerged that reflect frequently cited and emphasized bodies of leadership knowledge, skills, and abilities needed to function successfully in multi-faceted and highly demanding roles of school and district leaders. Using the most prevalent and repeating patterns among these, the On Track 360° leadership model was created to reflect the following roles of successful school leaders:

• Strategic Leaders establish a vision for learning and set clear goals for ensuring progress toward achieving them.

• Improvement Leaders use proactive thinking to explore solutions and engage groups in the process of implementing them to bring about change.

• Instructional Leaders implement a high quality instructional system that supports the learning of all students and adults.

• Collaborative Leaders organize and support teams that effectively plan and implement improvement strategies.

• Accountability and Systems Leaders organize and integrate processes that support instruction and monitor progress.

• Advocacy and Political Leaders establish coalitions among stakeholder groups that support school and district goals, and communicate their needs and successes.

Principal Turnaround Work and District Rapid Improvement In recent years, particular interest has been focused on “turnaround” and transformational initiatives to dramatically improve school performance at the school and district level. There is general consensus that principals hold the key to accomplishing meaningful and dramatic change at the individual school level. There is also a large body of work evolving around the transformation needed in central office work in order to move from organizations concerned primarily with leadership report to leadership support activities. Based on a literature review of successful turnaround efforts, and of characteristics common to most successful principals in turnaround schools, items were identified from within the On Track 360° standards and elements.

These items make up an additional 15-item scale from within the Principal and the Executive versions. The Principal Turnaround Scale provides feedback on the extent to which principals possess the important skills and abilities necessary for success in these challenging environments. Items reflect strength of individual participants with respect to: setting directions, developing people, redesigning organizations, and changing the culture in schools. Items on the District Rapid Improvement Scale reflect executive leaders’ agreement with the roles of district office leaders in: providing leadership for learning, and in the monitoring and modeling of instructional leadership practices.

Establishing Reliability and Validity Because this is a newly created assessment program, we are continuing to document validity and reliability evidence. Internal consistency reliability indices are computed following each group administration, and will be accumulated progressively to create a longitudinal database for further validation and item analyses.