NISL CURRICULUM
PHASE I
Course One: World-Class Schooling: Vision and Goals
Unit 1: The Educational Challenge
This unit explains why fundamental changes in the international economy have resulted in greatly raised educational requirements for all citizens in the advanced economies, and why social development and ethical behavior are no less important than high academic achievement. It helps the participant make a realistic assessment of the challenges that schools must meet if the new standards are to be achieved, including the corrosive effect of pervasive low expectations for many poor and minority students. And it is designed to help the participants accept and embrace the goal of getting every student ready for college without remediation by the time that student leaves high school.
Unit 2: The Principal as Strategic Thinker
The purpose of this unit is to enable the participant to think strategically about the challenges he or she faces and to put together a clear and powerful strategy for addressing those challenges. Much of this unit draws on experience from business and the military, but the participant is also asked throughout to apply what is learned to the world of the school—for example, they examine their own school visions against criteria for effective visions. Participants are introduced to the distinctions among tactical, operational, and strategic thinking. They are shown how to take into account all aspects of the problem to be solved, how to systematically assess the challenges to be overcome and the assets to be mobilized. And they are introduced to the elements of planning and decision making required both to construct a viable strategy and to execute it successfully.
Unit 3: Elements of Standards-Based Instructional Systems and School Design
The purpose of this unit is to help the participant develop a sophisticated understanding of the components of standards-based instructional systems and the ways those components can be combined to produce very powerful effects on student performance. Participants learn about different kinds of standards and assessments available and the appropriate uses of each. They learn how to distinguish assessments that are genuinely aligned to standards from those that are not. They learn how to build curriculum frameworks designed to array topics in a logical way to enable students to reach standards over a period of years and how to analyze and select instructional materials that are aligned with the standards and the frameworks. Most important, they learn what the role of the principal is in assuring that his or her school has a fully aligned instructional system that is focused on the standards and is internally coherent and consistent.
Unit4: The Foundations of Effective Learning
The purpose of this unit is to provide the participant access to the best research the world has to offer on the issues that relate to standards-based education and the role of the principal in leading his or her school to high performance. The research is distilled into a series of principles related to learning, teaching and curriculum. The principal is asked to consider the implications of those principles for the redesign of the school in the context of the new accountability systems and standards. The unit focuses on the particular role of the school leader in making sure that the way the school operates reflects each principle of learning, teaching, and curriculum.
Course 2: Focusing on Teaching and Learning
Unit 5: Leadership for Excellence in Literacy
This unit helps enable the participant to be an effective instructional leader in this crucial area. The aim is not to turn the principal into a literacy expert, but rather to enable the principal to recognize the key elements of best practice in the field of literacy and provide the principal with sound criteria for judging whether the school has an effective literacy program and some practice in using those criteria. Also included in this unit is instruction designed to enable the participant to recognize the key features of effective safety net programs in literacy, so that he or she can exercise leadership, if necessary, in the development of effective safety nets to make sure that all students are literate, no matter what level of literacy they had when they entered that principal’s school.
Unit 6: Leadership for Excellence in Mathematics
The aim of this unit is not to make the principal a math expert, but rather to enable the principal to recognize the key elements of best instructional practices in the field of mathematics—from basic skills to problem solving to conceptual understanding. The principal must be comfortable and confident in judging whether the school has an effective mathematics program and be able to lead continuous improvements in it. To that end, the unit brings the principal deep into math instruction in the classroom and provides video and role-playing opportunities for observations and coaching moments between the teachers and the principal. The unit also includes instruction to enable the participants to recognize excellence in safety net programs in mathematics. The principal must know how to put such a program in place to make sure that all students have the necessary mathematical skills and knowledge, no matter what level they had when they entered the school.
Unit 7: Leadership for Excellence in Science
Participants will thoroughly examine, share insights on, and plan to deal with the current context of science education, instructional best practices for improving science instruction, and the role of the principal as instructional leader of science in the school. Participants will learn to assist others to identify characteristics of a good science program as well as effective pedagogy for classroom practices. The principal's leadership is key in setting up processes within the school to ensure ongoing improvement in the quality of science teaching and learning, and alignment with a set of standards that result in achievement for all students.
Unit 8: Promoting Professional Knowledge
This unit helps enable the participant to lead a school-wide effort to continuously develop the professional knowledge and skill of the faculty. This means establishing a culture in which every professional on the staff is expected to be learning all the time and in which professional development is seen by the whole faculty as the most important tool by which it acquires the skill and knowledge it needs to implement successfully the strategies and designs the school has adopted for improving student achievement. Participants learn how to promote organizational learning through analysis of its successes and failures, through benchmarking best practices beyond the school and through disciplined searches for proven knowledge that bears on the challenges the school faces. Finally, the participant learns what to look for as he or she walks around the school and observes classrooms and how to use those observations as the basis for mentoring the faculty over time.
Coaching Institute: Using the roles of coaches in sports and business as a springboard for beginning this unit, we quickly move to the role and need for coaches in education. An instructional coaching model is introduced, and participants have an opportunity to analyze and plan for a coaching situation based on a video of a first year teacher. Our coaching unit is very interactive, allowing participants to engage in both individual and small group analysis using coaching scenarios and case study, as well as role-play in personal coaching situations that could occur in their schools. At the conclusion of this Institute, participants synthesize the concepts they have learned and create a presentation designed to introduce instructional coaching to their staff. A final activity has participants discussing ideas for promoting a culture that encourages and enriches coaching in their schools.
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PHASE II
Course 3: Developing Capacity and Commitment
Unit 9: The Principal as Instructional Leader and Team Builder
This unit enables the participant to reflect on his or her role as an instructional leader and to learn how to play that role effectively, alone or in combination with other members of the leadership team. The participant looks back in time to understand how the role of the school principal came to be disassociated from instruction in the United States, as opposed to most other industrialized nations, and reflects on the forces now at work to restore the principal’s role as instructional leader. The participant is introduced to a variety of ways in which the role of instructional leaders can be allocated among the people who together assume the function of the ‘principalship,’ and considers how best to distribute leadership and allocate responsibility in the school for this function.
Participants learn how to define the goals for teams, recruit and select their members, and motivate and coach them to success.
Unit 10: The Principal as Ethical Leader
This unit provides participants the opportunity to examine their roles as ethical leaders in their schools. Day-to-day pressures of being a principal, standards-based reforms, and new accountability requirements are fundamental conditions of the principal’s job. In many situations, principals are so pressured by operational demands that they lack time to think deeply about the ethical assumptions and implications of their decisions. Principals are not only responsible for their own ethical behavior but also must help create and nurture an ethical culture in each of their schools. The moral principles of a just, fair, and caring community are presented, and participants use these principles to guide their discussions and decisions about the several case studies used in this unit.
Course 4: Driving for Results
Unit 1: The Principal as Driver of Change
This unit enables the participant to design, lead, and drive a change process calculated to produce steady improvement in student achievement. The participant learns to analyze the motivations of the various participants in the process, to identify friends and foes and to maximize the former at the expense of the latter over time, moving steadily from small wins to substantial gains. The principal should also learn how to identify root problems and causes, gather intelligence, and formulate a plan on the basis of appropriate data, set performance targets, select strategies and develop sound implementation plans.
Unit 2: Leading for Results
The participant focuses on the crucial role of data in the drive for results, including setting targets, and collecting, displaying and analyzing data on program implementation and student progress in relation to standards. The participant also learns how to use data in the process of setting goals, monitoring progress, allocating and reallocating resources and managing the school program. Finally, the participant integrates materials from earlier units that relates to the crucial role of the principal in providing a vision of the results worth achieving, keeping that vision constantly in front of the school community and allocating responsibilities to everyone involved for realizing that vision.
Unit 3: Culminating Simulation
The culminating simulation draws together all the major themes of NISL into a two-day experience for participants. The computer-assisted simulation starts with a case study on Greenwood Middle School, including about ten pages of student data that participants study in-depth before the exercise begins. The exercise itself requires the players to make choices in response to questions and issues that are related to the scenario and to prior decisions. The responses follow a cause-and-effect chain of logic down six levels of relationships—such that choices made later in the exercise are delimited by earlier decisions. There are five baskets of issues related to the analysis of data, strategic thinking, distributed leadership, literacy (a main focus in the scenario), and coherence/alignment of all the elements of a standards-based system. There are also expert commentaries on video that are used to advance the discussion of each basket of issues. On the second day, the participants create two layers of the exercise themselves, based on an update (two years after the events in the main case study). The final phase has the participants choosing an action or initiative to apply in their schools, and then to report back on in about six months.