The author looks through Albert Bandura's self-efficacy lens onto the effects it likely has on school principals' effectiveness. Self-efficacy should be viewed as a principal's belief in his or her capabilities to structure a particular course of action in order to produce desired outcomes. Principal self-efficacy has been linked with effective…

Urban teacher residencies have emerged as an innovation for recruiting, preparing, and retaining teachers for high-need urban schools. Though residencies aim to prepare teachers for specific urban contexts, we know little about how context is conceptualized in the teacher education curriculum or what teachers learn about it. This study finds that…

The college and university presidency is one of the most coveted positions in academe. Due to the projected retirements of current Historically Black College and University (HBCU) presidents, the researchers interviewed 21 current presidents, institutional board members, and presidential search firm personnel to explore what current HBCU…

University professional development funds, generally present for faculty, and often available for graduate students through grants or stipends, are seldom available to undergraduates. In this study, we assessed Giddens and Pierson's (1998) structuration theory in terms of how a professional development fund for undergraduates can impact the lives…

Effective professional development that influences teachers' classroom practices starts with what teachers know, understand, and do in their classroom. The Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) challenge teachers to make changes to their classroom; to help teachers make these changes, it is necessary to know what they are doing in their…

Scholarship about the growth of educational development has charted major shifts in developers' focuses and roles through time and, especially in recent years, has explored the professionalization of the field around the globe. This essay uses a lifecycle analogy to consider the development of one organization, the POD Network (The Professional…

A successful component of programs designed to deliver youth leadership develop programs are youth educators who understand the importance of utilizing research-based information and seeking professional development opportunities. The purpose of this study was to determine youth educator's perceived confidence in leading youth leadership…

The assistant principalship is a vital and necessary pathway to the principalship. There are more demands for the principal to be the change agent for a school system and there is great concern about the quality of preparation for assistant principals who may become the future principals of the school. Taylor and Martin (2007) suggest that…

This dissertation is a case study of a professional development effort in a large urban school district over the course of one school year. With their district identified for improvement under the requirements of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 2001, district leaders were under pressure take corrective action. As part of their plan…

Changes in recent federal, state, and local legislation have added increased scrutiny of and pressure on the evaluation systems of educators across the nation. This scrutiny and pressure have prompted significant changes to both the systems and processes for determining and reporting the effectiveness of teachers and principals. One of the most…

There is no disputing the consistency of discourse in defining the competencies required for success in the 21st century. Higher education, corporations, non-profits, healthcare and government agencies alike are seeking employees with similar core competencies needed for operational excellence and sustainability. There is also consistency in the…

As an approach to the internationalization of higher education, Internationalization at Home (IaH) looks beyond the mobility of a minority of students, emphasizing instead the delivery to all students of an internationally focused curriculum and the embedding of intercultural communication. This can be expanded to include extracurricular…

This paper presents an approach to planning academic courses for pre-service teachers and for researching development of teacher identity. The approach was implemented in a course, conducted in an Israeli Master Teach program, designed to foster pre-service teacher identity transformation. The research described here addresses two questions: (1)…

In this paper, we present an analysis of the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning in Higher Education (SoTL) which contributes to SoTL both as a field of research practice and as a background to professional development in higher education. We analyse and describe the constitution of the field, and in so doing address its nature in the face of the…

Leading American schools is a multi-faceted and complex role as states have adopted requirements for the mentoring of new principals. Interactive problem-based simulations can offer novice principals opportunities to practice solving job-embedded issues. This study explored practicing administrators interacting with simulations embedded into an…