My district possesses its own leadership development program, entitled the Strand Program. While I have always been aware of this program, I had not given it a serious investigation, as I never intended to pursue a principalship. However, I was intrigued by the work mentioned in the article, “Bridging the Gap: Building Leadership Capacity” (Swinney, 2007), and I wanted to analyze the similarities and differences between the Strand Program and the program in Auburn City Schools. The Auburn City school system recognized a human resource need evolving in their district regarding the retention of top level teachers and administrators and the development of leadership among the current staff within the district. In response the district, in coordination with Auburn University, created a leadership academy available to teachers and administrators within the district. This academy met on several occasions and worked with a variety of topics related to challenges and charges of administrators, from diversity to budgeting to site-based decision making. The academy format built relationships and collaboration between teachers and administrators in attendance, and served the dual purpose of facilitating ongoing professional development for current administrators and encouraging the leadership potential of district teachers.

The main thrust of the reading involved a school system’s efforts to create collaboration between parties within the district and to facilitate growth and retention of quality educators and administrators through contextual, collaborative professional development. This relates to the following State Board for Educator Certification’s (SBEC) principal competencies:

Competency 1: The Vision of Learner-Centered Leadership and Campus Culture

1:1 - implement strategies to ensure the development of collegial relationships and effective collaboration.

Competency 6: Human Resources Leadership, Management, Professional Development and Appraisal

6:2 - facilitate the application of adult learning principles and motivation theory to all campus professional development activities, including the use of appropriate content, processes, and contexts.

6:4 - implement effective, appropriate, and legal strategies for the recruitment, screening, selection, assignment, induction, development, evaluation, promotion, discipline, and dismissal of campus staff.

6:7 - engage in ongoing professional development activities to enhance one’s own knowledge and skills and to model lifelong learning.

Competency 7: Learner-Centered Organizational Leadership and Management

7:4 - use strategies for promoting collaborative decision making and problem solving, facilitating team building and developing consensus.

The article speaks directly to the concerns that I stated in an earlier question: professional development needs to have relevancy to its participants, and collaboration needs to happen at all levels within the organization. This leadership academy could be a model for campus-level professional development as well, where campus administration does not merely sit in the back working on other projects during the presentation, or use professional development time merely as an avenue to further personal goals and objectives; rather, administration plays an active role in the learning and the dialogue, and uses feedback from the faculty to determine what specific concepts and subjects should be addressed in that forum. This article prompts me to take a much more serious look at the Strand Program within my district. Although I am still not inclined to actively pursue a principalship in my district, I recognize the need for all members of a school organization to be able to participate as faculty leaders. The competencies addressed in this assignment are the rules of governance that all schools should be following, which means that any educational leader needs to have an awareness of the competencies and their application. I would like to have any available resources in my toolkit to respond to situations in my classroom, on my campus, and out in the larger community.

Swinney, A. (2007, May/June/July). Bridging the Gap: Building Leadership Capacity. Best Practices , pp. 14-15.