Teaching, Learning, Policy & Leadership Theses and Dissertations
Permanent URI for this collectionhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/2759
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Item A Portrait of School District Crisis Management: Leadership Choices in Montgomery County during the Sniper Shootings of October 2002(2010) Porter, Brian Joseph; Mawhinney, Hanne B.; Education Policy, and Leadership; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The actions of two assailants who shot and killed 10 people and wounded three others, including a student, in the region around Washington, D.C., in October 2002, provides the backdrop for a qualitative study of the emergency response by school district leaders in Montgomery County, Maryland. The study explores and describes the experiences of the district's superintendent and a group of leadership staff, including the author as a participant researcher, and two elected officials and a union president who contributed to the decisions and actions. A non-evaluative study, based on portraiture in the form of case study, the narrative report provides often minute-to-minute detail of the events of the case and a unique perspective of crisis management and decision making at the school district level. The study revealed aspects of the case regarding implementation of an emergency response plan, involvement of principals, management style, political extremes, and phases of the crisis. The study also illuminated targeted objectives for decision and actions, including a central focus on mental health and communications. The study reflects a subject area that is largely overlooked in the research of education leadership. Implications from the study are that school district leaders need specific training and experience necessary to manage a crisis, make decisions under crisis circumstances, and improve their performance through practice. The study identifies licensure for school district leaders as a way to attain a standardized level of competency in crisis management and decision making skills. The study also provides an entry point for further research in educational crisis management and decision making. In particular, the study explores a unique blend of research encompassing critical tasks in public leadership during a crisis, complex transformational processes among the components of a school district's social system, and expectations of high reliability in organizational environments that support mindfulness and expertise.Item Supports for Principals' Sensemaking: Lessons from the Institute for Learning's Instructional Leadership Program in Baltimore, Maryland(2007-11-21) Ikemoto, Gina Schuyler; Honig, Meredith I; Education Policy, and Leadership; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Current federal, state, and local policies increase demands on school principals to take an active role in leading instructional improvement within their schools. For many principals "instructional leadership" (IL) represents a fundamentally new set of knowledge, skills, and practices. Accordingly, principals need assistance in engaging in IL. However, research on IL and principal professional development generally has not elaborated what such assistance might entail or how to implement it. This study addresses this research gap. First, it frames the problem of assisting principals' engagement in IL as in part a challenge of supporting their sensemaking about what IL involves and how to exercise it in ways relevant to their local contexts. Then it elaborates how concepts from socio-cultural learning theory help reveal features of assistance that support such sensemaking processes. Data come from an in-depth case study of the Institute for Learning's (IFL's) Instructional Leadership Program (ILP) in Baltimore City Public Schools (BCPS) and include interviews, observations, and artifacts. The ILP provided an important case for this inquiry because it deliberately aimed to support principals' sensemaking about IL as a cornerstone of its strategy for engaging a cohort of seventeen elementary school principals in IL. Findings reveal that the extent to which the IFL actually supported principals' sensemaking was inhibited by such district conditions as limited time and resources and political distractions. Despite these conditions, principals responded to some IL ideas in ways that reflect reformers' intentions. Principals were more likely to do so when the ILP offered several different types of support for their sensemaking and less likely to do so when the ILP offered a limited number supports for their sensemaking. When the ILP provided a moderate number of different supports for sensemaking, principals' responses to the ideas tended to be more varied; in those cases, other factors including district conditions, school conditions, and principal background seemed to influence their responses more strongly than supports provided by the ILP. Implications address how policymakers, professional development providers, and researchers can support principals' engagement in IL.