4.4: Discussion Questions and Exercises
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Chapter 4 Discussion Questions and Exercises
Discussion Questions
- The research consistently finds that principals in high-poverty schools have the least access to high-quality professional development. What structural and systemic factors produce this inequity, and what specific steps can a superintendent take to reverse it within the constraints of a typical district budget?
- Darling-Hammond et al. (2022) identify five domains of effective principal professional development: leading instruction, managing change, developing people, shaping school culture, and addressing diverse learner needs. Which of these domains do you think is most underserved by current district professional development systems, and why? How would you design a learning experience to address that gap?
- The Learning Forward Standards (2022) argue that equity must be a throughline in professional learning processes—not just a topic covered in one session. What does this distinction mean in practice? What would an equity-throughline look like in a year-long principal professional development calendar?
- Herrmann et al. (2019) found that even intensive professional development programs failed to shift principal practice when principals remained burdened by administrative overload. What does this finding imply for the relationship between role design and professional learning? If you were a superintendent designing a principal development system, where would you begin?
- The Aspen Institute (2023) frames the question of principal professional development as a question of systemic redesign rather than individual program improvement. What is the difference between those two frames, and why does it matter for how a superintendent approaches the problem?
Exercises
- Using Table 4.1 as a starting framework, audit the principal professional development system of a district you know—real or fictional. Map each current offering to one of the models described. Then identify the model most underrepresented in the current system and design one new initiative, grounded in at least two research sources from this chapter, to address that gap.
- Draft a one-page professional development plan for a principal in her second year at a high-needs elementary school. Identify two specific learning goals aligned to the Darling-Hammond et al. (2022) domains, describe the PD structures that will support those goals, and specify how the superintendent will monitor progress across the year.
- Design a three-session peer network for a cohort of five principals at different career stages in a mid-sized district. Specify the facilitation structure, the norms that would make the sessions psychologically safe, the problem-of-practice protocol you would use, and how you would connect the network to each principal's individual evaluation goals.
- Review the Learning Forward Standards (2022) and identify the three standards that you believe are most difficult for districts to implement with fidelity. For each, describe a specific barrier you would anticipate and a superintendent-level strategy for addressing it.
- Using Table 4.2 as a planning scaffold, design a two-year principal professional development initiative for Prairie View School District. Specify how you would address each of the six superintendent priorities, which research sources would anchor each priority, and how you would evaluate the initiative's impact at the end of Year 2.