This course covers the basic principles of engaging families and the community in the life of a school, a fundamental responsibility of school leaders. Topics include communication with the school community and families, community partnerships, crisis communications, and research-based engagement practices. This course will provide tools and resources for building positive relationships with staff, parents, and the community at large.

The role of principal is complex and demanding, but no other individual in a school is better positioned to impact student achievement and faculty morale. Students consider the school as an organization, and examine the routines and tools school leaders and teachers use to analyze and act on its management and climate, and then apply improvement science to identify effective and ineffective practices for a problem of practice in the specific area.

This course explores school finance principles and challenges, emphasizing budgeting activities like planning, data collection, development, communication, implementation, and monitoring. Topics include resource allocation, accounting, business management, organizational behavior, and data management. Students apply concepts and engage in discussions.

This course explores laws and policies that shape U.S. public school teaching and learning environments, covering Supreme Court cases and federal legislation. The course introduces legal principles and guidelines for fulfilling leadership duties and protecting the respective rights of student and teacher. Students will be prepared to make fair and ethical decisions, enhancing educational opportunities for all students.

This course gives students conceptual and philosophical frameworks for leading good instruction and creating conditions for teaching and learning in schools and districts. Students reflect on their own instructional filters and deepen understanding of what we know about effective teaching and learning. Considering various instructional issues, students learn to supervise and evaluate instruction, connecting supervision with professional growth.

This course provides educators with tools to initiate and sustain continuous improvement to promote all student's academic success and well-being. Drawing on improvement science, the course provides frameworks and protocols for understanding and leading systemic change in schools and school systems. Activities include authentic application of approaches used to support high-quality teaching and leading in P-12 school systems across the country.

Examines how, as a team, school leaders analyze the relationship of the integration of technologies to teachers' beliefs & practices & to local school culture, structures, & policies. Students will evaluate factors critical for successful implementation of educational technology; identify & deconstruct the distributed leadership of educational technology in a school setting; & plan comprehensively for a system of practice to lead EdTech.

Leadership for Equity of Diverse Populations seeks to support special populations in schools. It proposes that effective leadership for all special student populations involves particular knowledge and requires a strong equity orientation.

The primary goal of this course is to provide a structure to support you in planning and designing your Research-Practitioner Partnership Experience project. We will discuss how to find and contact a potential partner, how to begin a conversation about research with a partner, how to listen to the partner's needs, how to guide a discussion that focuses your project on a specific research question, and how to write the RPE proposal.

Problems of practice through systematic inquiry are the focus of this course. We explore the intersection of theory and practice with emphasis on the design of thoughtful, ethical inquiry about educational problems of practice. There is a co-requisite (EDLF 5301: Academic Writing for Practitioners that is focused exclusively on academic writing to address problems of practice).