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515855 research-article2013

JRLXXX10.1177/1942775113515855Journal of Research on Leadership EducationGinsberg et al.

Article

Using Transformative Experiences to Prepare Instructional Leaders Through Doctoral Education

Journal of Research on Leadership Education 2014, Vol. 9(2) 168–194 © The University Council for Educational Administration 2014 Reprints and permissions: sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/1942775113515855 jrl.sagepub.com

Margery B. Ginsberg1, Michael S. Knapp2, and Camille A. Farrington3

Abstract This article examines two questions: (a) In what ways can doctoral-level learning experiences help executive-level P-12 leaders to develop instructional leadership expertise and commitment to high levels of learning among diverse student groups? (b) How can educators be supported in this learning within the context of an Education Doctorate (EdD)? To explore these questions, we first draw on the literature concerning adult professional learning, instructional leadership, and the doctoral education of educators aiming for administrative roles and practice, to create a framework for examining university-based efforts to guide aspiring leaders’ learning in these realms. Then, focusing on the “instructional leadership” strand of an EdD program in which we are instructors, we examine how an appropriate learning environment can be constructed, and then illustrate the nature and evidence of learning with mini-cases of three different kinds of students who participated in the program. Keywords instructional leadership, preparation program topics, doctoral programs, leadership preparation programs, leadership curriculum and instruction, leadership preparation curriculum and instruction, diversity

1Edgewood

College, Madison, WI, USA of Washington, Seattle, WA, USA 3University of Chicago, Chicago, IL, USA 2University

Corresponding Author: Margery B. Ginsberg, Edgewood College, Madison, WI, USA. Email: [email protected]

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Given a clear consensus and strong evidence that P-12 educational leadership contributes to school improvement and gains in student learning (Elmore, 2000; Leithwood, Louis, Anderson, & Wahlstrom, 2004; Robinson, Lloyd, & Rowe, 2008; Waters, Marzano, & McNulty, 2003), there has been renewed focus in recent years on instructional leadership as a central part of school and district leadership work. Here, we treat “instructional leadership” broadly to include what educational leaders at school and district levels do to support instructional improvement and mobilize significant, enduring efforts by teachers and others to this end. We see instructional leadership as a moral act and public schools as institutional contexts fraught with power imbalances that privilege some groups over others. Our particular concern is to refocus attention on productive ways to redress educational inequalities for historically underserved students and communities. Yet it is unclear how best to prepare P-12 educational leaders in the United States for powerful, equitable instructional leadership work. The default answer has been a combination of “pre-service” training, typically offered through university-based graduate degree and certification programs, and continued learning on the job. However, an intensifying critique questions the capacity of such programs to equip aspiring leaders for the “real world” of instructional leadership (Levine & Dean, 2007; Murphy, 2007). In particular, low admissions standards, inadequate clinical components, and curricula disconnected from challenges schools face in bridging opportunity and achievement gaps are among the current critiques (Ladson-Billings & Tate, 2006; Levine, 2005). If valid, these critiques indicate clear limitations on the potency of graduate-level training for future instructional leaders. These concerns sit within a larger debate about the nature and value of doctorallevel education for individuals pursuing administrative careers in schools or school districts. The drumbeat of criticism (McCarthy, 2002) underscores concerns about how appropriately a traditional doctoral program prepares for the work that practicing leaders will be doing. Too easily, doctoral learning experiences can emphasize theoretical learning, scholarly methods, and broader foundational issues, rather than a rich repertoire of knowledge that informs and shapes leadership practice itself. An ongoing challenge has been to distinguish the Education Doctorate (EdD)—generally aimed at practitioners seeking to do administrative work—from the PhD— generally designed to train academics and researchers (Levine, 2005; Redden, 2007; Shulman, 2004). These critiques raise two fundamental questions for the doctoral-level preparation of educational leaders: (a) In what ways can doctoral-level learning experiences help executive-level P-12 leaders develop instructional leadership expertise and commitment to ensuring high-quality learning opportunities among diverse student groups? (b) How, if at all, can an EdD program provide educators with these learning experiences? As faculty members in the University of Washington’s Leadership for Learning (L4L) EdD program, the authors of this article have collaborated with colleagues over the past 4 years to address these questions, by revamping our university-based EdD program for aspiring system-level leaders. Together, we took responsibility for revising the Instructional Leadership segment of the program. The experiences of program participants—all seasoned principals, teacher leaders, or central office administrators

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pursuing graduate studies while working full-time—offer a useful window on the challenges of developing educational leaders and engaging questions raised by the critiques noted above. This article offers one answer to the questions noted above by examining and illustrating the L4L program’s transformational approach to preparing doctoral-level students for the work of instructional leadership. To anchor our analysis, the article selectively reviews theoretical and applied literatures and presents a modest qualitative analysis of selected cases from our most recent round of doctoral teaching. First, several theories of transformative adult learning and motivated action offer a conceptual understanding of relevant doctoral-level instruction. We then describe how we used these theories to design the program’s Instructional Leadership strand to engage students in a set of transformative experiences aimed at developing their instructional leadership capacity. We then examine evidence of learning from three illustrative cases of recent L4L students, selected to represent a range of experiential, geographical, gender, and ethnic backgrounds. We write, in effect, as participant observers and documentary analysts, drawing on an extensive documentary record of our teaching and students’ work—their reflections on assignments and their own leadership practice provide converging windows through which to understand the impact of our pedagogy. A concluding discussion reflects on what these cases do and do not tell us about potentially transformative doctoral-level preparation for instructional leadership.

Transformative Learning About Leadership Practice in the Doctoral Context Two sets of ideas provide useful frames to understand students’ experiences in the L4L Instructional Leadership strand. The first concerns “transformative” learning, and the second concerns leading instructional improvement.

Transformative Learning in Doctoral-Level Preparation of Educational Leaders A transformative approach to graduate-level instruction presumes that, for experienced educators to assume unfamiliar roles in improving schools and school districts, they need to engage in learning that fundamentally reorients their thinking and approach to leadership work beyond their practice to date. We conceptualize transformative learning in constructivist terms—learners construct knowledge out of their experiences, with a fundamental change in perspective as a desired outcome. Adult learning theories of transformative learning emphasize perspective transformation leading to personal action. According to Mezirow (1985), transformation begins with disorienting experiences or dilemmas and is aided by well-scaffolded meaning-making structures. Critical reflection and critical discourse are essential contributors to transformation (Mezirow, 2000), entailing evaluative self-reflection on one’s own assumptions relative to a problem. Ultimately, transformative learning

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leads to a change in beliefs, attitudes, or entire perspective “to make them more inclusive, discriminating, open, emotionally capable of change, and reflective, so that they may generate beliefs and opinions that will prove more true or justified to guide action” (Mezirow, 2000, p. 8). Theories of transformative learning applied to adult education emphasize the importance of deep encounters with value-laden content relevant to adult learners and the significant dilemmas in their lives (Taylor, 2009). Subject matter is contextualized within important issues such as educational equity and opportunity (Jarvis, 2003). In these views, teaching for transformative learning includes learner involvement in provocative experiences and discussions related to enduring social problems. While Mezirow and Taylor focus on individual transformation theory, Paulo Freire (1970/1994) asserts that transformative learning leads to the creation of a more just world. For Freire, social transformation is a consequence of personal empowerment that emerges when adults are aware of oppressive forces in their lives. Through problem posing, reflection, and dialogue with teachers and other learners, adults become aware of and act upon injustice. Freire’s (1998) orientation to transformation includes adults’ participation in developing theories that challenge complicity with dominant ideologies. Freire’s stance directly advocates radical social change in response to an unjust social order, and emphasizes the importance of problem posing, theory construction, and deliberate intervention in the world. Using Dewey’s (1938) concept of the “transformative experience” to describe the outcomes of transformative learning, Pugh (2011) asserts that “an experience is fundamentally transformative in that it changes one’s relationship with the world” (p. 110). Pugh differs from Mezirow, Taylor, and Freire in that critical reflection, critical discourse, and the questioning of learner assumptions are not essential to his conception of transformative experience. What matters to Pugh is how learning continues beyond the learning environment, how it is applied, and how it influences future thinking, feeling, or behaving. For Pugh (2011), transformative experience is a learning episode constituted by three characteristics: (a) motivated use, (b) expansion of perception, and (c) experiential value. Motivated use focuses on action outcomes of transformative experience when learners are motivated to use what they have learned beyond the instructional context, willingly applying their learning to a new task or problem-solving situation because of their enduring interest or value they place in the learning (Maehr, 1976). Expansion of perception focuses on the cognitive outcome of transformative experience through experiencing some aspect of the world in a new way by seeing everyday objects, events, or issues through the lens of the learning content (Pugh, 2011). Experiential value focuses on the emotional outcome of transformative experience when a learner values a newly learned idea for the way it enriches everyday experience (Pugh, 2011).

Leading Instructional Improvement in Schools and Districts Connecting transformative notions of learning to leadership that concentrates on teaching and learning improvement presumes a useful way of defining,

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conceptualizing, and recognizing “instructional leadership.” Here, recent scholarly discussions offer helpful insights into what aspiring leaders are seeking to learn. An emerging picture of educational leadership treats the improvement of instruction as a primary goal. Our own framing of “learning-focused leadership” (Copland & Knapp, 2006), evolving ideas about the nature of “instructional leadership” (Hallinger & Heck, 2010; Knapp, Mkhwanazi, & Portin, 2012; Reitzug & West, 2011), and recent treatments of leadership for instructional improvement (e.g., Fink & Markholt, 2011) offer a strong basis for specifying the content of the transformative learning process we have sought to construct. Central to these notions are the leaders’ deep knowledge of instruction (e.g., Stein & Nelson, 2003) and understanding of the contexts of student learning, coupled with the leaders’ commitment to making the learning of students, professionals, and the system itself a persistent, public focus of leadership work (Breidenstein, Fahey, Glickman, & Hensley, 2012; Copland & Knapp, 2006). Work on the education of historically underserved students helps clarify the context for instructional improvement and its moral imperative, and hence the leadership work related to it (see Knapp, 2001; Murphy, 2010). While early articulations emphasized the work of individuals, especially school principals as singular instructional leaders (e.g., Hallinger & Murphy, 1985; Smith & Andrews, 1989), more recent theory and research place emphasis on the collective, shared nature of instructional leadership, involving individuals at multiple levels of the system (e.g., Elmore, 2000; Marks & Printy, 2003; Spillane, 2005). In this emerging view, the capacity of a distributed network of individuals to exercise effective instructional leadership depends on various tools, competencies, and conditions, such as a shared instructional framework, the ability to use such tools to frame both instructional problems and leadership challenges, an appreciation of the current context for students’ learning including conditions that create systematic disparities in learning performance, and a grasp of adult learning principles in support of teachers’ professional learning. These ideas imply certain kinds of learning environments that would be likely to help aspiring educational leaders develop frames of reference, skills, and knowledge that would equip them for instructional leadership work.

A Theory of Action That Underlies Our Course Sequence These ideas on transformative learning and instructional leadership converge in a theory of action that guides our course sequence on Instructional Leadership. To begin, the theory of action presumes that transformative adult learning theories are both content for leaders’ learning and a means for engaging in that learning. Our theory of action postulates that a university-guided doctoral program, based on these theories, can develop instructional leadership capability by engaging adult learners in professional contexts that compel interest and desire to make meaning, promote agency, encourage reflective discourse and reciprocal sharing of information, lead to reconsidering ideas and assumptions, and motivate new forms of action determined in concert with others (Grabov, 1997; Mezirow & Taylor, 2009). Furthermore, we assume that educators will be able to participate more effectively in instructional leadership

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work if they develop sophisticated instructional frameworks, use these frameworks in actual practice settings, engage others in their use, and visualize their leadership as focused on both instructional and leadership practices. Finally, these leaders’ learning is enhanced through iterative participation in university settings (where “big ideas” can be easily introduced, manipulated, and reflected upon) and practice settings (where these ideas can be applied and “lived” in solving real problems). This approach to coursework elaborates on Donaldson’s (2008) metaphor of transformative adult learning as starting with a “pebble in your shoe” (p. 40). Within doctoral-level leadership preparation, as within schools and district contexts, adult learning that significantly impacts student learning relies on well-sequenced sets of context-embedded professional learning that respect nuance without compromising depth (Little, 2002; McLaughlin & Talbert, 2001; Villegas & Lucas, 2002). In doctoral-level leadership preparation focused on improving instruction, as in P-12 education, intrinsically motivating and potentially transformative instruction aligns with several converging lines of scholarship that emphasize knowing and connecting with students (Moll, Amanti, Neff, & González, 1992), understanding how students learn (Brophy, 2004; Dweck, 2006; McCombs & Whisler, 1997), and working through reflective yet pragmatic forms of sense-making in pursuit of valued outcomes (Ginsberg & Wlodkowski, 2009; Merriam, Caffarella, & Baumgartner, 2007). Our challenge has been to create the conditions in which adult learners will experience deliberately sequenced critical events that provoke a well-scaffolded chain of responses to deeply concerning problems of leadership practice. Our approach to identifying and probing “problems of practice” conceptualizes intellectual activity in ways that position leaders within social and cultural realities of people’s lives. In doing so, we develop a pedagogical and curricular architecture that allows for emotion, locally informed theories of action, and deliberative intervention.

A Doctoral Context for Professional Learning Aimed at Instructional Leadership Practice With these framing ideas in mind, we sketch below the doctoral program setting for our Instructional Leadership course sequence, and then introduce the sequence itself.

The L4L EdD Program L4L is a self-sustaining, cohort-based, modular EdD program in the University of Washington College of Education, seeking to prepare effective, reflective leaders with a compelling vision of powerful leadership practice in educational systems. Graduates assume leadership roles in P-12 educational systems or organizations supporting the improvement of P-12 systems. Most L4L students are already practicing educational leaders. Nearly all graduates advance in their careers, with most currently serving in executive leadership positions in school districts, education agencies, and other educational organizations within Washington State. Currently in its 11th year, the program is now serving a fifth cohort of 32 educational leaders. Curriculum development,

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teaching, advising, and completion of a “capstone portfolio” are advanced by a sixmember core faculty team who meet monthly to forge connections across the curriculum, integrating assignments when possible. From its start in 2002, L4L has sought to distinguish the EdD from the PhD (Murphy, 2007). Official recognition as a “practice-doctorate program” at University of Washington–Seattle (UW) allows it to operate outside of normal doctoral requirements aligned with the established PhD, and instead to focus on the needs of practicing educational leaders. Rooted in the scholarship of application (Boyer, 1990), with a core commitment to social justice, all coursework develops the practical skills, conceptual knowledge, and political will of system-level leaders in the context of current challenges and dilemmas of public education in the United States. After successful completion of the 3-year program, students earn the University of Washington Education Doctorate and are qualified to apply for a Washington State Initial Superintendent Certificate. (Not all do, as the program is not role-specific.) Currently, L4L has one of the strongest completion rates in the country, with more than 80% of our students graduating within 4 years.1 Through a new capstone portfolio process, students continuously construct, examine, and publically vet products from coursework and their leadership practice across the program’s 3-year cycle. The capstone portfolio is based on four standards, developed by the program team, for system-level leadership practice, which cohere around the primary L4L goal: to prepare capable system-level leaders whose practice is informed by inquiry, anchored in a commitment to equity, and focused on the improvement of teaching and learning in dynamic and demanding environments. The 3-year portfolio development cycle offers an additional opportunity to capture and articulate the learning taking place across time. At the program’s conclusion, students present to a panel of faculty, peers, and colleagues from the field evidence of their learning in relation to all the standards, as evidenced by their coursework, related leadership actions, and deeply reflective practice. The doctoral degree is awarded upon completion of program requirements and successful presentation of the capstone portfolio. Our analysis of student cases draws heavily from coursework and reflections on learning and leadership in the capstone portfolios of three students.

The Instructional Leadership Course Sequence—Strategy and Rationale Instructional Leadership, a primary strand of L4L, along with strands concerned with inquiry, equitable systems leadership, and professional growth planning, constitute a comprehensive curriculum that includes various topics related to leadership practice in educational systems (e.g., concerning inquiry, resource allocation, governance, policy design and implementation, organizational change, historical perspectives on educational leadership, education law). The strands are interwoven in various ways; inquiryfocused instructional leadership, for example, is a core concept and students often combine assignments from the Inquiry and Instructional Leadership strands. Each strand references particular system leadership standards that were developed by program faculty; students reflect on their learning in the Instructional Leadership strand in relation to the following overarching standard for system-level leadership practice:

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Standard 3: The Improvement of Teaching & Learning When leaders demonstrate leadership along this standard, they are able to a. articulate a theory-based vision of deeply engaging, culturally responsive, and intellectually challenging instruction and adult professional learning; b. construct/adapt/select and use instructional frameworks and other leadership tools to optimize student and adult professional learning; c. engage relevant players collaboratively and draw from school-based and community expertise and resources in instructional improvement work; d. fashion and enact systems to support and sustain instructional leadership, inside and outside of schools; e. craft/adapt instructional visions, practices, and other supports appropriately for meeting specialized learning needs (e.g., of English language learners [ELLs], students with identified disabilities); and f. analyze assessment practices and use assessment data of various kinds to improve instruction. The Instructional Leadership strand focuses cohort members on leadership challenges in promoting more equitable forms of classroom instruction within a school or district and presents useful frameworks and skills for meeting these challenges based on the following assumptions: •• At its root, leadership of schools and educational systems is, and must always be, about the improvement of instruction. •• Instructional improvement presumes leaders’ ability to understand the dynamics of teaching and learning as they occur in classrooms for individual teachers and students and for aggregates of students, teachers, and classrooms. •• Current instructional practice in most settings is likely to be unwittingly, if not overtly, inequitable, posing a fundamental equity challenge for leadership. The Instructional Leadership course sequence entails four major topic areas, which we addressed through the first and second years of the 3-year cohort cycle, alongside and integrated with their activity in other strands. At the end of each year, students’ participation in the portfolio development cycle allows them iterative opportunities to make sense of instructional leadership work. Topic area A:“Seeing” learners and learner diversity in context and in relation to equity. Cohort members focus on seeing learners as individuals and groups with rich and varied backgrounds. To pursue these matters, the cohort engages in three kinds of activities: •• Assembling and translating ideas about what sustains or potentially eliminates achievement gaps. The cohort reads material and participates in activities to sharpen understanding of disparities in educational achievement in ways that inform their educational practice. They review various literature-based

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explanations for racial/ethnic achievement gaps (e.g., resource disparities, ineffective schooling, institutional racism, intellectual inferiority, social reproduction), debate their application to educational settings, and translate them into an Achievement Gap Memo to a local district audience to help elucidate local systematic achievement disparities and visualize appropriate actions related to them. •• Shadowing a learner who struggles with school. In this shadowing activity, cohort members choose a learner (Grades K through 12) in their own or another’s school, who might be expected to struggle in the classroom, and follow this student for a day or more, describing and interpreting their observation for what it says about teaching and learning improvement and for instructional leadership. We include a set of diverse and often controversial readings on the achievement gap—for example, Ladson-Billings’ (2006) notion of “education debt” and Herrnstein and Murray’s (1994) The Bell Curve—and ask educators to see the familiar (learners, schooling) with new eyes. We thus attempt to create a sense of disequilibrium—a “disorienting experience” (Mezirow, 2000)—to enable transformative learning and crystallize how equity issues might reside inside instruction and instructional leadership work. Topic area B: “Seeing” instruction and reimagining teaching practice that supports equitable learning. This segment focuses on “powerful” and “equitable” instruction and how it can reduce achievement gaps. While cohort members bring well-developed and diverse skills to this task, we seek to sharpen their perception of what is—and could be—taking place in instruction, through several rounds of work: •• Attempting to visualize and observe purportedly “gap-closing” instruction. Based on readings and discussion about effective instruction, cohort members construct observational tools to surface the elements of instruction most likely to reduce (or maintain) achievement gaps. At this stage, their tools combine their own “wisdom of practice” with ideas in the literature. Using these tools, they observe and document instructional practice in a classroom they presupposed would be likely to reduce achievement gaps. Debriefing and comparing what they actually see bring to light complexities and blind spots in assumptions about effective instruction and how to identify it. •• Analyzing and integrating instructional frameworks and creating associated tools. Following the observational work, cohort members examine frameworks that approach effective instruction differently. By re-analyzing their observations of “gap-closing” instruction from the perspective of each framework, they have to wrestle with underlying assumptions and grapple with how frameworks shape what observers might “see” in a classroom. From this experience, they create both a graphic and written comparative analysis of the frameworks. Finally, students create their own framework (and associated observational

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tool) that captures what they believe is most central to instructional practice and useful in future efforts in instructional improvement. Topic area C: Engaging in instructional leadership work. Cohort members engage in instructional leadership work on a limited scale by conducting a “lesson study” cycle with a small group of colleagues (consisting of jointly planning a lesson, teaching or observing the lesson, and jointly debriefing the lesson). After readings and a demonstration, cohort members design and conduct the cycle and then debrief to better understand how to engage others in such instructional improvement work. Topic area D: Assessment and data in instructional improvement. At the end of Year 1, we shift our focus from instruction to evidence of student learning. Cohort members choose data on student learning (from individual examples of student work to state assessment data) and describe how they would use the data with adults in a particular school or district context to foster deeper understanding of teaching and learning. This assignment encourages students to recognize the limitations of standardized test data and expand thinking about evidence of student learning; how different kinds of evidence affect our understanding of instruction; how to produce most useful evidence of learning; and how evidence of student learning can enrich professional learning for instructional improvement. Final topic areas: Special needs learners and a second look at adult learning theory. In Year 2, cohort members apply Year 1 experiences to leadership in their own workplace settings by developing, implementing, and reflecting on action cycles (e.g., shadowing students, lesson study) through collaboration with colleagues. With instructional frameworks they developed in Year 1, they apply ideas about adult learning and motivation to build the capacity of colleagues. For example, some students recruited a team of administrators to help them teach about and support the implementation of shadowing to a network of principals in their district. In addition, Year 2 focuses on students served by special education and English language learning programs. Cohort members watch the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) special “Fear and Learning at Hoover Elementary” for perspective on policy initiatives such as California Prop. 187. They read materials about supporting ELLs and students with disabilities. To deepen cohort members’ awareness of these students’ experiences and the stories of their families, and to identify leadership practices for ongoing inquiry and advocacy, cohort members shadow a student with disabilities or second language learner, and follow-up by meeting the student’s parent or guardian in their home or other location. Connections to other strands and the overall capstone portfolio process. Throughout the program, assignments seek to leverage the learning from one strand to deepen cohort members’ experience in other strands. For example, the Inquiry strand introduces “inquiry cycles” as a way of organizing the work of school or district leaders to frame, investigate, and respond appropriately to problems of student learning, teacher

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practice, and leadership practice. To that end, paralleling the emphasis on theories of action, inquiry, and action cycles in the Instructional Leadership strand, students learn to conduct mini-cycles of inquiry; identify and frame various problems of practice; develop a theory of the problem and theory of action to address it; take action; and then collect and use evidence to monitor progress and make adjustments.

Evidence of Learning: What Cohort Members Did, Said, and Produced The structure of the course and program as a whole and the students’ responses to it offer some natural evidence of students’ learning experience. We assembled that evidence through a series of steps, employing qualitative content analysis techniques primarily, supplemented by our own participant observation in the events we described. First, guided by, but independent of, the students’ own capstone portfolios, we assembled a case profile for a small group of students who we selected to represent a range of the students who the program serves, differing by gender, ethnicity, and role—one a middle school principal, another an elementary instructional coach, and a third working with a reform support organization that works with schools and districts to build teacher leadership capacity. While virtually all of the students in the program successfully completed the course sequence described above, these students were among the more articulate ones, who could express more fully the learning processes and discoveries they experienced. Our case profile of each pulled together course assignments, entries in the capstone portfolio (from different years), notes we had taken at various stages in the unfolding of the strand curriculum, and observational notes taken from a visit to the students’ workplaces. Based on a review of these materials, and with emphasis on what the students were able to articulate in their capstone portfolios, we searched for evidence of (a) early learning during the first year; (b) discoveries over time, which accumulated to form a new sense of professional identity or supported new forms of leadership practice; and (c) transformative moments and events, in which early dissonance or disequilibrium prompted a resolution, as transformative theories would predict. We offer here an instructive glimpse of the learning that occurred, not a complete study. A more formal and complete investigation of this learning process would have triangulated these data sources more fully, possibly by interviewing the students at different time points; but our analysis was sufficient to illustrate what could happen across this program experience, and we would assert probably did happen for many of our students. In the presentation of the cases that follow, all names are pseudonyms.

Case 1: Lizette Mornay Lizette Mornay came to the EdD program with a background in professional development and instructional coaching work. A National Board Certified Teacher, she had held various school-based teaching and teacher leadership positions, and was working

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for an organization that supported teacher quality improvement initiatives when she joined L4L. She was a seasoned instructional leader familiar with the nature of effective instruction. What evidence would indicate that such an individual would encounter a transformative experience in this kind of curriculum? How would it equip her to do future system-level leadership? Lizette’s early insights: A new sense of connection with individual learners who struggled. Lizette gave early indications that paying more systematic attention to the nature of the achievement gap and to the individuals who might be caught in it brought new perspective to her work. Interacting with the literature concerning the causes of the achievement gap “helped me develop my ideas about what social justice means in our education system.” Creating the Achievement Gap Memo sharpened her equity lens, as she searched for ways to make the sources of the achievement gap understandable and the possible remedies clear to an actual district leadership team. The task of shadowing a student (in the same district) through a typical day was especially instructive: The Shadowing a Learner experience pushed my thinking a great deal. I have been in this particular classroom many times, and so I have knowledge about how teaching and learning occur on a day-to-day basis. However, in all of the times I’ve observed or volunteered, I have never totally focused on the experience of an individual student. I learned that sometimes what seems to be “working” is not necessarily working for everyone. This understanding is so easy to miss when watching just the teacher or watching a class as a whole. I also was struck by how many times the teacher used strategies individually with the student I observed while continuing to somehow still instruct the rest of the class. Above all, this experience reminded me of how incredibly complex the work of a skilled teacher is.

The assignment redirected her attention to individual children’s differing needs and how those could be attended to through instruction. Lizette’s growing insight into ways to frame and articulate powerful instruction. The analysis of different frameworks for viewing instruction stretched Lizette into a broader way of viewing instruction. In this work, she integrated the guiding framework of the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards (NBPTS) with two other frameworks: one focused on the motivational aspects of instruction and its cultural responsiveness, and the other on the elements of rigorous and compelling instruction in challenging settings (Farrington, Nagaoka, & Roderick, 2013; Ginsberg, 2011). This singularly “frustrating assignment,” in hindsight, yielded powerful learning. Lizette reflected in this way: Prior to this assignment I was very comfortable using the NBPTS standards as an instructional leadership tool, and by the time of the assignment I felt fairly comfortable with the Motivational Framework. However adding the Rigor Model to the analysis made the assignment extremely difficult. After many hours of grappling, I finally created a graphic to show how the three frameworks fit together. This process helped me reconstruct

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and therefore deepen my mental framework of instructional tools that I can now use in my work as a leader to enact systems to support good instruction.

Her synthesis of these three frameworks produced an “architecture of accomplished teaching.” She was able to combine ideas from the frameworks so that teachers could see in their planning and teaching how to ensure high levels of motivation, relevance to students’ lives, and rigor in the learning environment. This formulation gave Lizette a more developed tool to draw upon in her already well-developed instructional leadership practice. Lizette’s discoveries about engaging others in the learning process she was experiencing. In Year 2, Lizette engaged colleagues in similar learning experiences, while deepening her own understanding. To complete the Adult Learning Project, she worked with several teacher leaders, introducing them to the shadowing experience to surface important new dimensions in their work with teachers. She recounts: Knowing how effectively the shadowing process can be used to surface equity issues, I used it as a means to assist teacher leaders to articulate issues in their setting and then be strategic about their actions in order to work toward solutions in partnership with other leaders. Being in the position of helping others use the shadowing process to surface equity issues helped me understand it even more deeply as a powerful tool. Assisting other leaders to plan and lead equity conversations helped me to solidify my practice more deeply than just leading my own conversations would have, because I used metacognitive strategies to make my thinking visible to those whom I mentored.

Lizette’s later entries in her portfolio emphasized ongoing leadership work rather than discrete assignments—as intended, because the course sequence’s ultimate goal was to reshape cohort members’ actual practice. As the last assignment in the Instructional Leadership sequence, she chose to work collaboratively with others on supporting district leaders piloting a new teacher evaluation system and helping to guide an “instructional rounds” group of principals who were seeking ways to finetune their knowledge and skills related to improving instruction. Lizette’s arrival at a new and secure sense of herself as an equity-focused instructional leader. In her final thoughts about what the course and program had meant to her work, Lizette articulated the changes in her view of herself as an instructional leader: I now see my work (and my life) through the lens of social justice and equity. I find myself in professional and personal conversations pointing to instances where equity is present, and when it is not, I am no longer sheepish about raising questions and offering solutions. I now not only see speaking up as a moral and ethical responsibility, I have the knowledge and language to do so effectively. Additionally, I am now more focused on finding evidence to formulate and support my ideas rather than just going with my gut. I am so much more confident working as a systems-level leader because I feel more grounded in knowledge that is research-based, ideas that are solution-oriented and

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focused on the outcome that is most important to me: ensuring that all students have the opportunity to learn to their highest potential . . . I am forever changed for the better.

This culminating statement reflects Lizette’s full experience in L4L, not only in the Instructional Leadership strand. Her experience across the program and the sequenced activities across 3 years have built a different sense of herself as a learner and leader. A case such as this reveals intriguing, if partial, evidence of a transformative learning process at work. The program led her to experience the attributes noted earlier in our theory of action: it compelled her interest and desire to make meaning, promoted her agency, encouraged her participation in reflective discourse, led her to reconsider ideas she came with, and motivated new forms of action she has engaged in with others. Doing so in the context of a university-based doctoral program helped her build a platform of ideas and research-based understanding that offers a secure foundation for her future work.

Case 2: Ivana Walker As with Lizette, Ivana Walker came to the program with extensive professional experience and knowledge. A well-respected principal of a large middle school, she had also led a small alternative high school and participated for 2 years in an extensive professional development process for experienced administrators. Ivana aspires to “lead from the middle” to build instructional leadership capacity throughout her district. What evidence indicates that Ivana encountered the L4L curriculum in transformative ways? What might it equip her to do in future system-focused instructional leadership work? Ivana’s early insights: A new sense of possibility for engaging teachers and administrative colleagues in collaborative and generative professional growth. Ivana gave indications early in the course sequence that comparing and creating an instructional framework allowed her to more deeply probe and shape conversations about teaching and learning. Seeking to productively interrupt “the negative rhetoric and subsequent narrowing of teaching and leadership practice,” she found observing and analyzing “gap-closing instruction” to be valuable: Particularly beneficial was blending and adapting the “motivational framework” with the “rigor model” and then reexamining the gap-closing instruction lesson through the combined lens. For the past several years and in my daily work with teachers, colleagues, and other district leaders, the term “rigor” appears in virtually every discussion, every curricular decision, and in every reform strategy surrounding increased academic expectations, college readiness, and instructional improvement. Yet, throughout those discussions, there has been no consistent definition or understanding of what actually constitutes rigor in practice. In blending the frameworks I was continually engaged in thinking about how differing observational tools shape what I see in a classroom, as well as the conclusions drawn

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around the practice observed. Through this exercise, my goal was an attempt to conceptualize a fair and consistent working framework for defining, developing, and observing rigor in practice, through instruction that is intrinsically motivating and, thus, culturally relevant.

Once Ivana better understood her own ideas about a trustworthy framework to guide instructional planning and implementation, she engaged in a dialogue with her teachers: The focus of our discussion was to try to conceptualize a way to show the interrelated nature of each element of the framework and that each component reciprocally shapes support, rather than acting independently.

Beyond what the assignment required, she worked with teachers to define activities and strategies that aligned with the frameworks’ various categories. She continued to pursue ways to critically and analytically think through these frameworks with coaches and teachers. For Ivana, this was an interactive and iterative learning process rather than a final product. Ivana’s discoveries about engaging others in the learning she was experiencing. In her initial portfolio reflection, Ivana noted that the shadowing assignment was foundational to developing a theory of action for addressing inequities in student learning. She became so passionate about the stories that shadowing experiences evoked that she extended an invitation to district administrators to join her in developing their own approach to shadowing. Ivana found that shadowing was a way to lead with a learning-focused stance. Rather than providing answers, it prompted better questions about instruction and instructional leadership practice. It also developed powerful stories to bring attention to pressing issues for system-wide instructional improvement. Ivana also saw shadowing as a way to sharpen administrative colleagues’ awareness of the consequences of their district’s exclusive reliance on numeric data: Numeric data alone risks reinforcing negative attitudes, beliefs, and deficit thinking about the potential capabilities and subsequent achievement of students in underserved student groups. Further, examining data by itself does not convey a compelling sense of urgency or agency at any level of our system in changing the schooling experiences of students who fall on the wrong side of the achievement gap.

Shadowing not only redirected Ivana’s attention to understanding problems of practice from the perspective of marginalized students but also motivated her to begin the difficult work of changing systemic instructional patterns. She used her initial shadowing experience as the basis for facilitating professional learning experiences for colleagues, presenting to her school board and to superintendent’s cabinet, and addressing audiences at state and national conferences.

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The role of dissonance in initiating a new and secure sense of self as an equity-focused instructional leader. An entry in Ivana’s final portfolio began with a quote from Mezirow (2000) on the need to experience new ways of understanding that exist outside current frames of reference. Despite initial reluctance to devote precious work time to experiential assignments such as shadowing, Ivana came to appreciate inquiry-oriented experience for propelling deep shifts in beliefs, perspectives, and actions. She became aware of the connection between transformative learning and her enduring interest in intrinsic motivation. Acting on this perception, she nurtured dialogue among teachers in her school by inviting them to set annual goals and explore them through action research. As part of this process, Ivana worked with teachers to shadow students, visit their homes to understand families’ strengths and experiences, engage in lesson studies that keep the images and profiles of students in mind in planning rigorous learning experiences, probe numeric and qualitative data for ways to improve instruction, and examine grading policies. All five of these activities were pursued as inquiry cycles within the work Ivana did in the Instructional Leadership strand and the parallel L4L Inquiry strand. Ivana has gone beyond intellectual persuasion as a catalyst for school improvement. Yet she approaches transformative, equity-focused adult learning with a blend of confidence and caution. Discomfort is necessary for challenging our existing frames of reference, yet leaders must establish trust. Moving beyond surface-level practices requires walking a fine line that involves creating discomfort and messiness that is necessary to transformation and establishing safety, trust, and motivating parameters essential for deep, sustainable change that spreads and lasts.

As with Lizette, Ivana’s learning reflects her full experience in the L4L program, not only in the Instructional Leadership course. Her experiences—and those she guided with her colleagues—began with dissonance, which significantly connected to personal and professional values. The dissonance was sustained and nurtured through a coherent platform of meaning-making structures that promoted agency, encouraged participation in reflective discourse, led to a reconsideration of existing ideas, and motivated new forms of action.

Case 3: Dalton George Unlike Lizette and Ivana, Dalton George had limited leadership experience when he came to the L4L program. A Plateau Indian, Dalton was a kindergarten teacher and then an instructional coach at a reservation school for one of the Coast Salish tribes. He grew up hearing stories of Indian boarding schools from his grandmother and wanted to become “an educational leader who can help to bring change” to school systems serving reservations that are largely inadequate, including the one serving his own children.

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Dalton focused on figuring out how to develop the cultural competence of White teachers in reservation schools. He entered L4L with a clear sense of purpose as well as with humility about the limitations of his authority. He was not comfortable in the policy arena and believed that his expertise resided inside the walls of a classroom. How might L4L help Dalton develop his leadership skills and voice to improve schools serving American Indian children and families? What evidence would indicate that Dalton’s L4L experience was transformative? How might the program equip him to be effective in future leadership roles beyond the classroom? Dalton’s early insights: Articulating historical reasons for long-standing achievement gaps in Indian education. Dalton jumped into the first Instructional Leadership assignment, reading and analyzing articles that suggested different explanations for “achievement gaps” in school performance. In a Memo to the School Board, he articulated his understanding of the gaps in achievement he observed between White and Indian students, and made recommendations to the Board to address them. Dalton reflected that I was able to clearly state what I believed was happening in our system that was impeding progress for the vast majority of our students, but perhaps more importantly, what we could do to remedy those conditions . . . The Achievement Gap Memo allowed me to define the social justice agenda I found critical to closing the gap between our students’ current levels and excellent levels of achievement. While educators in our system may work to resist explanations that place blame on our students, it has been a challenge to find places to gain understanding of what has happened in our community and society that has put us in our current position. There are great challenges for all working in an inequitable system; leaders in such a system, I believe, must take the first step of articulating what the challenges are and then propose solutions that interrupt the oppressive system that operates successfully for only a small portion of students.

Dalton chose to share his memo only with a small group of allies, including his principal and “a group of teacher leaders who are committed to doing ‘what it takes’ for our students.” Sharing his memo marked an initial public act of articulating a vision for equitable educational practices and the role for leadership in confronting an inequitable system of education. The memo reflected his struggle with how to communicate to teachers in the district (who were almost all White) the history of challenges facing the Indian community as well as that community’s strengths. Early in the Instructional Leadership sequence, Dalton read Luis Moll’s work on “funds of knowledge” and participated in a home visit with a colleague. He was drawn to the idea that the assets students bring into the classroom are often squandered by teachers because they are largely unrecognized. Yet, as an instructional coach, he knew that teachers were struggling to educate Indian children effectively. The experience of shadowing a student for a day reinforced his belief that White teachers needed to understand more about traditional Indian culture to better serve the children they were trying to teach. Dalton’s growing insights about how to bridge the gap between student needs and teacher knowledge. Dalton’s shadowing experience also sparked critical reflection on “the

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distance between students and teachers and the setting of policies.” Incorporating new learning from another L4L module on policy and resource allocation, Dalton grew increasingly frustrated with long-standing school policies he saw as either harmful or ineffectual. Expanding his awareness beyond classroom walls, where he felt “most comfortable,” he started to appreciate the interdependence of multiple layers in a complex system. He reflected, . . . conducting the shadowing assignment not only brought me closer to students and their daily lives in classrooms, playground, and lunchroom but also helped me see the need for teachers to be supported by the entire system in order to support students in need.

Acting on this insight, Dalton made recommendations to the school’s student intervention team, tasked with responding to referrals from classroom teachers “for students who seem to need support beyond what the classroom teacher can provide.” Essentially, it occurred to me that the members of the team simply did not have enough knowledge of the students they were charged with supporting, especially any strengths those students had. After shadowing and sharing some findings and insights with the team, I proposed that we include shadowing as part of our process to get to know the student in terms of his/her assets. Each member of the team is now required to spend a significant amount of time shadowing the student before making recommendations for interventions. Further, interventions should be based on assets noted while shadowing the student. I have received feedback from the team that the process has been enlightening. The referring teachers have noted that because we spend time with students of concern in supportive ways, teachers feel as though the team is more productive and relevant than it has been in the past.

Dalton began to think of other ways to bridge the gap between teachers and Indian children. He often spoke of the disconnect he observed between children’s behavior in their own community and in their school classrooms. He knew that these students were engaged and respectful in community settings. How could he help teachers see and experience this? Dalton creates opportunities to engage others in a process of seeing children in new ways. Dalton noted that “the teaching in our reservation schools creates a discontinuous experience for students more familiar with traditional tribal settings and for teachers completely unfamiliar with those very settings.” To remedy this, Dalton planned with tribal elders to include teachers and district leaders in the annual Salmon Ceremony of the Coast Salish tribes. The only place many White educators and district leaders had been on the reservation were its district-run schools. Most accepted Dalton’s invitation and participated in a pre-ceremony introductory session, observed a practice ceremony as well as the actual Salmon Ceremony, and attended a debriefing session afterward to discuss the instructional implications. The experience focused participants on the ways children were learning their roles in the sacred traditional ceremony and the conditions that supported their learning. In the debriefing session,

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teachers talked about the ways they could apply what they learned to their own classroom practices. Dalton was able to influence the district’s commitment to the idea of developing teachers’ cultural competency. In reflecting on the Salmon Ceremony, Dalton wrote, To many, work in the area [of cultural competency] is seen as “one more thing” that teachers should not be asked to take on due to all other requirements placed on them. I have had administrators around me question the timing for this level of professional development because teachers are not “ready” to implement practices beyond the standard work being asked of them on a general level . . . [With teacher participation in the Salmon Ceremony] I was able to demonstrate for people that this is not simply work that can be included when time permits, but is work that is necessary to allow our other instructional improvement work to make a significant impact on all students.

Dalton was finding ways to exercise leadership to advance goals he saw as fundamentally important to children’s—and teachers’—education. Dalton brings his unique lens to a new instructional leadership role. At the end of his first year in L4L, Dalton’s school was merged with another, under a federal School Improvement Grant, and he became a principal of a transformation school. The federal grant required the school to meet student performance targets and provide ongoing, job-embedded professional development for teachers, but did not specify what the professional learning should include. What that means in practice has been left up to me as an instructionally focused principal. I have determined the need to include cultural responsiveness alongside, and woven into, work around literacy and math. From what I have gathered at statewide meetings, my school is unique in [our] interpretation of this policy . . . With my final year project I utilized professional learning . . . to explore the idea of culture in math and literacy lessons.

Now Dalton was in a position to demonstrate what professional learning and practice infused with cultural competency might look like. L4L equipped Dalton for this role in various ways. Dalton felt that he had benefited greatly from his achievement gap analysis, his shadowing experience, and leveraging the concept of funds of knowledge to broaden teacher understanding of Indian culture. Weaving together his learning across the L4L program, he wrote in a more confident voice about the role of a system leader. He noted that each of the L4L Leadership Standards began with the individual leader and then spread out to a larger group of stakeholders, expanding influence in a systematic way that culminates in a strategic action plan. He saw himself as responsible for driving this process in his school. Once a leader understands issues/problems plaguing a system, and his or her own role in taking action, he or she can create a network that includes many like-minded individuals that can support the work of improving the daily reality for students and teachers by

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“shepherding” stakeholders toward a particular set of actions. These actions should ultimately begin to inform policy-setting decisions to direct improvement initiatives for greater impact on equity and excellence at levels extending from individual students, to the classroom level, to the entire school.

Although well-grounded in critique of his school system’s inadequacies, Dalton did not begin L4L with a vision for how to lead in ways that would bring real change. Looking back on his growth since entering the program, he remarked, My goals have remained the same, but my practice has changed in such a way that the idea of “changing” systems through leadership is now much more focused on action. I remember submitting that statement with my application for admission into this program; I was full of thoughts and dreams, but simply had not developed the leadership practice to take action in an intentional or systematic way.

This case provides evidence of some of the ways Dalton’s L4L work engaged his daily professional challenges to create a transformative learning process moving him beyond a comfort zone. Through experiential opportunities such as shadowing, use of inquiry cycles, and ongoing critical reflection, Dalton integrated his knowledge to create an instructional vision that had the power to compel others to much-needed action. He took what he learned within the university and applied it to his own context in ways that expanded his capacity as an instructional leader. His next goal is to create a regional network of reservation schools and leaders working together to improve American Indian education by building the collective capacity of educators and tribal leaders. He sees himself leading professional learning “which allows for the advancement of tribal students on reservations across the region.”

What These Cases Say About Doctoral Learning to Improve Instructional Leadership The evidence reviewed above displays a set of learning experiences that have guided at least three L4L doctoral students toward powerful, equitable instructional leadership work. More definitive evidence of this learning would require a more formal study design, better pre- and post-measures, and a larger sample of student participants. Yet, emerging from the analysis are glimpses of change in cohort members’ instructional leadership practice and their capacity to understand and articulate it. This suggests that a transformative process may be at work in this course sequence, and that a university-based, yet practice-focused doctoral program setting can shape this experience.

Evidence of Transformative Learning To summarize, these are the clues that the three students’ work and our own observations offer about the nature and potential power of their learning experience:

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•• Even though they brought well-developed skills and knowledge of instructional leadership to doctoral studies, each demonstrated substantial changes in their leadership practice and thinking about instructional leadership work, which they attributed to their experiences in L4L. Lizette’s development of a secure, equity-focused conception of her leadership illustrates this process, as does Dalton’s discovery of his capacity for school- and system-wide leadership focused on cultural responsiveness. Ivana shifted both the arena of her leadership work (increasingly working in cross-school settings, even though she was still a principal of a single school), and the nature of her work with other adults (increasingly anchoring it to adult learning principles). •• Particular assignments and learning activities acted as milestones in the learning process, with certain assignments standing out for different individuals as especially salient prompts for their learning. All three included a wide range of L4L assignments in their portfolio discussions and as attachments to the portfolio offering evidence of their learning. But particular assignments clearly had a stronger impact on some than others—in Lizette’s case, the new intellectual work of constructing a more integrative instructional framework beyond her “comfort zone” with the NBPTS standards was an especially powerful learning experience. Both she and Ivana were struck by the power of shadowing an individual student learner, and subsequently incorporated this activity into their own leadership work. Dalton’s initial work articulating the sources of inequity in an Achievement Gap Memo set him in motion toward a new sense of himself as a leader, as did Ivana’s work on the Adult Learning Project, in which she incorporated various prior learnings into new ways of engaging her teaching staff. •• Prompted by L4L assignments, the three participants found ways to embed in their daily practice ideas they were encountering in the program, and they did so increasingly over time, such that by the time they completed the program, their daily practice was the primary referent for reflected learning. A clear indirect indicator of this process was the differences between Year 3 entries in the portfolio versus Year 1, with the latter dominated by actual leadership work, and the former primarily focused on activity and learning within discrete L4L assignments. Specific instances of the process were instructive, for example, Lizette’s use of her newly developed integrative instructional framework with teacher groups or Dalton incorporating into his school’s student intervention team work a requirement that anyone referring a child spend time shadowing the learner prior to referral, and bringing a set of focused observations to the team for consideration as well as observations concerning problematic schooling experiences. •• The chance to reflect back on the meaning and import of these assignments gave students (and faculty) perspective on what made the biggest difference to their learning, and a way to corroborate their learning over time. These three participants were increasingly articulate over time about their learning, and especially in the final round of their portfolio work, about the bigger meaning

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of their learning and the changes in their leadership practice. Ivana was able to see at that stage how her earlier discomfort—the “dissonance” that transformative learning theory posits—was a key to her learning process. By the time she finished L4L, Lizette could see and put words around the “secure equity focused stance” she had developed as a leader. Dalton could place himself as an active agent in a larger, White-dominated system who had the capacity to help the system become more culturally responsive. To be appropriately self-critical, we must consider some limitations to both our data and our conclusions. For one thing, some of the apparent learning and program impact may have reflected the students’ increasing mastery of program rhetoric and the language of the leadership standards, which offered them a convenient vocabulary for talking about their work and learning. For another, it is possible that the cases we chose were simply exceptions to a rule of less powerful impact on others, a possibility that only a more systematic review of all participants’ profiles and portfolios would dispel. Third, the retrospective nature of the reflection-based evidence offered here might have obscured the real “baseline” for change that any learning process implies, and that students reconstructed their histories to make them congruent with a desired present. Finally, the analysis offered here may have overestimated the impact of student experiences in the Instructional Leadership strand while underestimating those of other, related parts of the program. That said, the multiple ways of understanding the learning process of these three participants and the multiple time points we considered (e.g., first-, second-, and thirdyear/culminating entries in the portfolio, along with our informal participant observations during different episodes of instruction and the actual student work products from those time periods) offered converging evidence of a transformative process that is both plausible and most likely to have occurred. And we would assert that the partial evidence we offer rests on a more substantial body of evidence that formal study and more extensive retrospective analysis would uncover. While the evidence we offered has convinced us that these students, along with many others like them in our program, are making big strides toward becoming more effective, equity-oriented instructional leaders at a system level, we should note several missing ingredients and missed opportunities in the learning sequence that we have been working to address in a subsequent round of the program with a new cohort. First, a curious omission, we neglected to expose these students to the considerable body of research on instructional leadership itself, now several decades old, that is yielding increasingly useful insights into leadership practices and frameworks aimed at instructional improvements (e.g., Hallinger; 2011; Halverson & Clifford, 2013; Honig, 2012; Knapp, 2014; Neumerski, 2013; Printy, Marks, & Bowers, 2009). In part, such an attempt would have helped students be clearer about the differing and complementary roles that actions taken at different levels of the system might have played in supporting instructional improvement. In addition, we could have spent more time considering the interaction of instructional leadership with framework-driven teacher evaluation systems now proliferating across the nation, as

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educators and policy makers strive to insure and support a high-quality teacher workforce.

Implications for the Future, Here and Elsewhere To the extent our claims about the impacts of this instructional sequence hold true, our analysis suggests that several ingredients in this program are worth replicating in future iterations of the program, if not others across the country. The sequence of learning opportunities embedded in the Instructional Leadership strand, and in the program as a whole, offers aspiring leaders, who are already effective educators, repeated encounters with challenging circumstances that do not fit their habituated ways of understanding their work. These “pebbles in the shoe” are the starting point of transformative learning. This course sequence drew students into such situations and scaffolded their movement through these times of discomfort into a new synthesis of leadership ideas and practice. Furthermore, the learning experiences set in motion a transformative process around the content that is arguably central to instructional leadership work in contemporary schools and school systems. In particular, the sequence of learning activities and support repeatedly exposed L4L students to (a) the nature of instruction that is both powerful and equitable, in the current context of systematic disparities; and (b) the engagement of adult educators in motivating learning opportunities. Students encountered multiple representations of these ideas, in both conceptual and practical settings, and they were repeatedly invited to embed these ideas in their daily leadership practice—a particularly strong combination for impacting practice. The repeated encounter with powerful ideas occurs in another way in this kind of curricular structure. By making a cumulative portfolio the central vehicle for demonstrating mastery and documenting successful conclusion of this program, students had repeated opportunities to make sense of their experiences and develop successively sharper mental models embedded in professional contexts. This required cohort members to “learn twice” as they deeply reflected on new ideas and then applied that learning to engage others, again embodying a central principle of transformative learning. Finally, the context of doctoral education seemed to offer an especially appropriate milieu for engaging these ideas and scaffolding this learning. Central to doctoral learning is a close, analytical look at ideas developed through research (e.g., concerning the sources of the achievement gap, the nature of gap-closing instruction, and theories of transformative adult learning). While not purporting to teach a particular set of “research-based practices” (as in many professional development efforts outside of universities), we sought instead to develop the students’ capacity to conceptualize instruction and instructional leadership work, appreciate what a research base did and did not say, and use powerful ideas from theory and research as anchors for their leadership work. The journey through doctoral education—in this instance, a doctorate of and for leadership practice, quite unlike the PhD journey—was an appropriate venue for developing such habits of mind. Ultimately, we would assert that these habits of mind

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are essential to new habits of practice and vice versa. Whether this particular approach to doctoral education accomplishes that goal for the long term remains to be seen, but deserves our continued scrutiny. Authors’ Note This article was presented at the annual meeting of the American Education Research Association, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, April 13-17, 2012.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Note 1. A comprehensive overview of the continuously evolving program is available online at http://depts.washington.edu/k12admin/l4l

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Author Biographies Margery B. Ginsberg, PhD, is distinguished professor and lead faculty for Edgewood College’s Adult and Professional Learning MA in Education Program. Formerly, as an associate professor at the University of Washington–Seattle (UW), she taught an Instructional Leadership Series with her coauthors and for several years served as lead faculty for Leadership for Learning doctoral program for aspiring executive-level educational leaders. Her research and practice focuses on intrinsic motivation as the foundation for adult learning and school transformation. She received the AERA 2013 Relating Research to Practice Award in the category of professional service. Michael S. Knapp, a professor of educational leadership and policy studies and director of the Center for the Study of Teaching and Policy in the University of Washington College of Education, focuses his teaching and research on educational leadership and policy making, school and school system reform, the professional learning of teachers and administrators, and methods of inquiry and policy analysis. In recent years, his work has probed the meaning and forms of “learning-focused leadership” in schools, districts, and state systems of education. While considering various settings and applications, his work pays special attention to the education of disenfranchised populations, mathematics and science education, and the professional development of educators. Camille A. Farrington, PhD, is a research associate (assistant professor) at the University of Chicago School of Social Service Administration and the Consortium on Chicago School Research. Her work centers on the intersection of policy, practice, and student experience in urban high schools, particularly focusing on classroom instruction and assessment, academic rigor, academic failure, and the role of noncognitive factors in academic performance. She formerly taught in the UW College of Education and the UW Leadership for Learning doctoral program.