One of the challenges that school districts periodically face is how to maintain organizational continuity when there is a large turnover of teachers and, or, administrators. The ideal way to meet this challenge is to have folks in the pipeline who are ready to step up to fill these openings. Doing this for our teacher vacancies is not as immediate as we would like, and heavily depends on our recruiting efforts and our reputation. For principals however, we can play a more active role.
Last spring we established a partnership with UAA to offer the necessary principal training courses. We then created a cohort of 15 of our teachers who are interested in becoming principals. This cohort approach has several advantages including the district playing an organizing role, using local instructors that allow the application of content to have a local flavor and offering more face-to-face classes. Although the teachers pay for their coursework, we are using stimulus funds to help with travel and lodging and various other small items of support. The cohort will work through their courses and be eligible to apply for their administrative certificate in May of 2012.
Growing our own
One of the challenges that school districts periodically face is how to maintain organizational continuity when there is a large turnover of teachers and, or, administrators. The ideal way to meet this challenge is to have folks in the pipeline who are ready to step up to fill these openings. Doing this for our teacher vacancies is not as immediate as we would like, and heavily depends on our recruiting efforts and our reputation. For principals however, we can play a more active role.
Last spring we established a partnership with UAA to offer the necessary principal training courses. We then created a cohort of 15 of our teachers who are interested in becoming principals. This cohort approach has several advantages including the district playing an organizing role, using local instructors that allow the application of content to have a local flavor and offering more face-to-face classes. Although the teachers pay for their coursework, we are using stimulus funds to help with travel and lodging and various other small items of support. The cohort will work through their courses and be eligible to apply for their administrative certificate in May of 2012.