| Assessing and evaluating the effectiveness of school boards and superintendents is a crucial step in meeting district goals. This article from District Administration discusses how a school board and superintendent tracks progress toward goals and how the public can understand this progress. The article provides an example of a process a district leadership team can undertake to assess and evaluate their work. Elements of the evaluation are included in addition to common pratfalls to avoid. |
| This brief shares the field-based insights that participants shared on assessment and evaluation questions, promising practices and program challenges. Eight themes emerged during the discussions: start with an explicit theory of change, focus simultaneously on program results and design, build on existing knowledge and available research, work to fill knowledge gaps and disseminate best practices, context matters: new leaders go to old systems, inform, engage, and collaborate with key policymakers, and listen to practitioners. |
| With support from The Wallace Foundation, a team from Vanderbilt has been developing a standards-based, multi-component assessment system. This article provides background on the conceptual framework of The Vanderbilt Assessment of Leadership in Education, or VAL-Ed, and updates readers on its development process. VAL-Ed, can be used for measuring leadership behaviors of individuals or teams to provide diagnostic analysis, performance feedback, progress monitoring, and personnel decisions. The article notes that the conceptual framework of VAL-Ed is “anchored in and significantly aligned with the Interstate School Leaders Licensure Consortium standards.” |
| The development of effective school leadership has been seriously hampered by the lack of technically sound tools to assess and monitor leaders’ performance. With support from The Wallace Foundation, a team from Vanderbilt has been developing such an assessment system, and this paper presents the conceptual framework for their learning-centered tool. Field testing is set for completion in 2008 and it will be widely available thereafter. Meanwhile, this paper previews the basics of this much-needed new assessment system. |
| The conceptual framework emerges from Vanderbilt University’s three-year project to develop a set of instruments to assess the effectiveness of educational leadership (both individual and team). This report provides the empirical foundation for an approach to leadership assessment. The review of literature is organized around eight dimensions of learning-centered leadership: vision for learning, instructional program, curriculum program, assessment program, communities of learning, resource acquisition use, organizational culture and social advocacy. |
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