Every district wants its schools to shine, and more are recognizing that, in order to raise performance, they need well-trained principals who can shake up the status quo and create an environment where all students flourish. Indeed, in a six-year study analyzing data from 180 schools in nine states, researchers from the Universities of Minnesota…

The significance of effective leadership and management for successful school and student outcomes is increasingly being recognised. This has led to consideration of the nature of preparation and development required to promote good leadership. There is now widespread acknowledgement of the need for specialised training for school principals. This…

This research seeks to look at the effect of the new Swedish training programme for head teachers by comparing it with the previous national training programme and does so primarily through an analysis of documents and texts that served to underpin the two different programmes. To put the Swedish teacher-training programme in an international…

The intent of this article is to examine how the best type of internship, i.e., the full-time, job-embedded model can be enhanced using coaching. Before illustrating an exemplary internship program with coaching, this paper describes what an exemplary full-time, job-embedded internship experiences looks like and expounds on the importance of…

Formative coaching, an approach that uses student work as the foundation for mentoring and professional development, can help principals become more effective instructional leaders. In formative coaching, teaches and coaches analyze student work to determine next steps for instruction. This article shows how a principal can use the steps of the…

Traditional professional development focuses on declarative and procedural knowledge. That is, participants usually learn what to do and how to do it rather than when to do it and why it is important. In McREL's leadership development program, they focus first on providing participants with an overview of research findings found in their…

Effects of training four urban high school principals in problem solving with adolescents and family members were assessed in simulation and naturalistic settings. Quality of problem solving exhibited was greater following training. Other principals indicated that the training program would be beneficial to themselves and other school…

This paper evaluates an intensive 2-year Dutch training course, "Magistrum," as one possible answer to the training needs of principals. The paper posits the following question: "Is the Magistrum, as an illustrative example of an intensive training, an effective answer to the principals' need for professional development?"…

Five selections summarize training methods for the principalship from the perspective that cognizance of the complexities of being a principal arises from practice, thus experiential learning should be incorporated into preservice and inservice training programs. The first selection, "Making Sense of Principals' Work," by Kent Petersen, is a…