Leadership Content Knowledge

CDT staff continues to investigate the Leadership Content Knowledge of elementary and secondary adminstrators. Click on a link below to view information about these projects:

The issue of what school and district administrators need to know in order to function well as instructional leaders in standards-based educational environments is beginning to be addressed conceptually and empirically. The construct of “leadership content knowledge,” recently introduced by Stein & D’Amico (2000), adapts Shulman’s construct of pedagogical content knowledge (Shulman, 1986) to the administrative domain.

This study investigates the content knowledge (i.e. the ideas about mathematics, learning, and teaching) that elementary principals use in the administrative practice of classroom observation and teacher supervision. It also explores how principals’ ideas about the nature of learning affect how they attend to sociological dimensions of their practice, such as the way they view the organizational, social and political contexts of their work, and how this combines with their content knowledge to shape actual administrative practice.

This study addresses the following questions:

  1. What ideas about mathematics, children’s learning, and elementary mathematics instruction inform what principals attend to when observing elementary mathematics classrooms?

  2. How do these ideas inform their judgments about the quality of the instruction they observe and what they decide to talk with teachers about in post-observation conferences?

  3. How does this content knowledge shape their leadership concerns in the actual practice of classroom observation and teacher supervision?

The research is designed in two stages. Stage 1 focuses on the content knowledge that 20 principals use when viewing classrooms in an experimental context. Data will include background interviews and questionnaires about principals’ assessments of 2 videotapes of elementary mathematics classrooms. Stage 2 will focus on how principals’ ideas about the nature of learning shape their attention to a variety of contextual features when doing classroom observations in their own schools. Data will include interviews, field observations and artifacts from classroom observations done by a subset of 8 principals. Data analysis will be both within-case and cross-case. Analysis will begin during the first year, interwoven with data collection, and will proceed through the second and third years.

Products will include papers examining such topics as: what principals need to understand if they are to correctly interpret what is happening in classrooms where students’ mathematical thinking is at the center; analyses of how principals’ content knowledge shapes their consideration of contextual considerations; and recommendations for the design of professional development for elementary principals.

 

Principal Investigator: Barbara Scott Nelson
2003 – 2005
Supported by the Spencer Foundation

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

EDC Home Page Site hosted by Education Development Center, Inc. © Copyright 2008. All Rights Reserved.