FOR RELEASE: Thursday, December 11, 2008
Future Principals Think on Their Feet During Classroom Walk-Throughs
University of Arkansas students in one of Paul Hewitt's educational leadership classes pose for a photo before spending the day at Harp Elementary School in Springdale this fall. They are, from left, Gary Udouj, Mindy McFarland, Joe McClung, Ben Lewis, Joanna Lever, Sean O'Toole, Jonathan Warren, Jason Jedamski.
Faculty in the educational leadership program in the College of Education and Health Professions believe strongly that real-world experience is vital for students. Many of those enrolled are already employed as teachers or coaches, and the program that will prepare them for administrative leadership positions affords them the opportunity to learn by doing.
"Classroom walk-throughs are one way that a principal determines needs of teachers for in-service instruction," said Paul Hewitt, an assistant professor of educational leadership. He was a school superintendent in California for 17 years before joining the University of Arkansas faculty in the fall of 2007. "Actually, this school, Harp Elementary in Springdale, is a pretty atypical school. It's about as good as you can get."
Joe McClung watches from the back of a classroom. He and other educational leadership students were evaluating classrooms based on several characteristics, including classroom management, appropriate content, interaction and feedback.
One day back in October, the students in Hewitt's Instructional Leadership, Planning and Supervision class met him at the Springdale school, and he put them to work. Each of the eight students spent 10 minutes in 22 classrooms in the kindergarten through fifth-grade facility. Other than time for a lunch break, they had two to three minutes to get from one classroom to the next.
Hewitt instructed the students to assess the classrooms on eight characteristics: classroom management, appropriate content, key concepts and skills made visible, oral academic language use by students, interaction, no cold reads, feedback to students and checks for understanding and language. They used a rubric in which they recorded whether the characteristic was observed or not observed, effective or superior.
"This technique gives them a sense of what the whole school looks like, not only individual teachers," Hewitt explained. "The value of this is, as a new principal, they can quickly get an idea of what is going on in a school and what they may need to do to improve the quality of the school."
The students also saw another side of a principal's duties when the Harp principal joined teachers to perform Swedish rock band ABBA's "Dancing Queen." The number – complete with teachers in 1970s garb – was the finale of a musical the students performed for their schoolmates before the evening performance scheduled that night.
Information about the educational leadership program can be found online at http://edle.uark.edu.