Quick, tell me how much you know about the people in the following list:
- Luvern L. Cunningham
- Barbara Jackson
- William L. Boyd
- Wayne Hoy
- Martha McCarthy
- Flora Ida Ortiz
- Jerry Starrat
- Cecil Miskel
- Catherine Marshall
- Karen Seashore Louis
Maybe you recognize a few of those names? None? Well, those are the most recent recipients of the Roald F. Campbell Lifetime Achievement Award, an award given by UCEA “for the purpose of recognizing senior professors in the field of educational administration whose professional lives have been characterized by extraordinary commitment, excellence, leadership, productivity, generosity, and service.”
I know many of those folks personally. They are some of the brightest, most dedicated educators I could ever know. They are incredible scholars and thought-leaders in the field of educational leadership. They are VERY deserving of that award. But, let me ask you this…Have YOU ever heard them speak? Ever read anything they wrote? If not, why not?
- Jeffrey Maiden
- Jay P. Scribner
- Linda Skrla
- Julie Mead
- Roger Goddard
- Cynthia Reed
- Gerardo Lopez
- Andrea Rorrer
- Suzanne E. Eckes
- Meredith Honig
- Thomas Alsbury
- Jeffrey Wayman
- Sara Dexter
Any of those names familiar? Those are the most recent recipients of the Jack A. Culbertson Award also presented by UCEA “annually to an outstanding junior professor of educational administration in recognition of his/her contributions to the field.” There at least a couple of folks on that list that I would count as friends; something beyond mere acquaintances. They, too, are super smart, incredibly dedicated educators of sitting and aspiring school leaders. Here, though, I’m guessing you have even less familiarity.
There is a lot of blame to be thrown around. However, my point here is not to throw anyone individually under the bus. Consider, though, the following points:
- If professors of educational leadership truly want to be the thought leaders and to be a part of any sort of school change process, they need to free themselves from the shackles of tradition. They need to stop publishing their high-quality, thoughtful work in journals that nobody who does the work of school leadership reads. They should make it a point to publish in open access journals; open access is not mutually exclusive from peer-reviewed. Also, they should disseminate their ideas through blogs so they don’t have to wait for the ridiculously long lag-time associated with publishing in journals. My educational leadership professorial colleagues such as Scott McLeod, Justin Bathon and Bruce Baker disseminate their knowledge beautifully and regularly on their blogs. They also regularly engage with educators and educational policy-makers through Twitter. They should be beacons for the future of the educational leadership professoriate.
- While we wait for educational leadership professors to heed my advice (ha!), YOU all might try to track down some of the work of the folks on those lists above. If you’re serious about school reform, stop reading pop-psychology and marketing books written by people who wouldn’t know John Dewey from John Stamos. If you can find it, also go read work by other amazing scholars of educational leadership not on that list: Andy Hargreaves, Ken Leithwood, Joseph Murphy, Michael Fullan, Tom Sergiovanni, etc. If you consider yourself a school leader and those names don’t at least ring a bell, I submit that you’re doing it wrong.
- The organizations of professors of educational leadership need to step up their efforts at knowledge dissemination. I note that next week is the annual conference of NCPEA. What’s that? Well, it’s only one of the two major national organizations (along with UCEA) of professors of educational leadership in the U.S. Want to know what will be happening at that conference? Yeah, me too. Problem is, that organization does not even make the conference program public. Here’s all you can know without actually registering and getting a print copy of the program. There will surely be some very interesting conversations and presentations at the NCPEA conference, but nobody will see or hear those except for those attending. There will be no live streaming of any sessions, and I’d be surprised if even one attendee sends out a single tweet from the conference. UCEA is getting a little better about knowledge dissemination. If you look at the top right of their website, they’ve begun to dabble with social media (thanks, largely, to Scott McLeod’s usual hard work and pestering).
- We have lots of silos to break down. The scholar-practitioner divide/spectrum needs to be obliterated. I know there is value to professors of educational leadership conferring to discuss their work, hence the UCEA annual convention and the NCPEA annual conference. I know there is value to school leaders conferring to discuss their work, hence the NASSP, NAESP, AASA, ASCD, NSBA, etc. conferences. But, we need to bring these folks together, virtually and/or f-2-f. One of my goals this year is to work with Scott, Justin and the other folks at CASTLE to bridge some gaps; to bring together thought-leaders and leaders.
Great post and points Jon. One of my struggles after obtaining my Ph.D from UW-Madison was the seeming disconnect between scholar and practitioner. I still see it not only on Twitter, but in blogs, at conferences and in conversations.
PS. I know two of the people in the second list: Jay P. Scribner and Julie Mead — Spent great times in grad school at UW-Madison with Jay chuckling at The Onion, especially the headline: Standard Deviation not Enough for Perverted Statistician!
http://www.theonion.com/articles/standard-deviation-not-enough-for-perverted-statis,8892/
Really really good points. How can you be a leader if nobody has heard of you? If we keep all our good people locked away in the ivory tower, how can they lead? Things are moving too fast to wait for information to gradually trickle down.
If a leader publishes a paper in the closed woods, and no one is around to read it, does it make a sound?
I love this post, Jon, because of your focus on the silos that separate leading thinkers from actual practitioners. I don’t know a single person on either of your lists despite being a guy who reads a ton about school leadership.
That’s probably because—as you mention—I can’t get easily get my hands on anything that they’re writing, interact with them in any meaningful way through social media, or attend (virtually or in person) any of the conversations that they’re presenting at.
A question that I think professors of educational leadership need to consider is what impact does this “distance from the people” have on their credibility or the overall impact of their message?
Personally, I’ve gotten to the point where if someone doesn’t have a blog, interact through social media tools, or publish in journals and forums that are free and open, I don’t even bother to hunt down their message.
I know that’s lazy—-both you and Scott McLeod has written about how important it still is to read the foundational research that is supporting our profession and guiding our decisions—-but I don’t, and I suspect that I’m not alone.
If thought leaders want to be thought leaders, they’ve got to get their messages out to broad audiences, something that is best done in “nontraditional” ways.
The corollary question becomes what happens to education when guys like me never bother to read or learn from researchers who have discovered real insights and trends that are impacting classrooms?
If the kind of formal knowledge that your colleagues produce is ignored by jokers like me who are “learning the easy way,” won’t our schools suffer from a lack of meaty, meaningful information?
Interesting stuff indeed.
Bill
Great post. I had the Hoy&Miskel text for my intro to admin course. I think the accessability issue is a big one. As a student, I have access to almost antlything through my uni library. I think that is the only thing I will miss when I finally finish & defend my dissertation and will mo longer be a registered student.
Great Post! I nominate it for an #edblog award.
But seriously, who are the “thought leaders” leading if their thoughts are locked away behind ironclad firewalls? I would go a step further than you do here and full-out declare that the Emperor has no clothes, indeed he never did, but in this anytime, anywhere world of real-time communication where, as S. Craig Watkins says, “we have become our own paparazzi,” the Emperor is always on display.
Am I the only one who sees great parallels here to the reason Kennedy beat Nixon in 1960?
Great post, Jon, and it takes me back to a Twitter sidebar we had a few weeks ago. It’s a shame that most educators (myself included) don’t know more about these distinguished leaders and instead are left with whomever is currently on the Best Seller list.
Great post Jon. I wonder if any of them will see it–I hope so!
What stands out for me here is that these leaders have a huge source of energy to draw from if they were connected in some way to some of us practitioners in the field who are trying to push the envelope or ask the questions.
We’d both gain from the experience, but most importantly I think we have to ask–how much will our students benefit from a more “connected” ed leadership environment? Because isn’t that what they and we are all here for?
Hi Jon,
While not a leader, per se, I thank you for helping me identify the names of folks I need to be reading.
Would you go one step further and create a short book list? A good primer?
Since my program is not leadership (i.e. not EDLP) this is not an aera I know much about. A good intro text would be nice.
Thanks..
Chris Craft (@crafty184)
I’m a preservice teacher starting up my third year in an undergrad program. I think I may have a unique perspective on the idea of an academic journal; to me, they seem ancient and obsolete, because finding them requires a trip to a library miles away. But they aren’t obsolete, which is the problem!
I did just a quick, cursory scan of the academic database that my college provides for students, using these names as a starting point. I will admit that I did not go through the entire list, but for the ones I did, I found a lot of work readily available… from the late 90s or even long before. For anything that was written after 2005, I almost always was referred to the main campus library, which is 3 hours away.
It’s 2010. There’s no reason that these journals should not be accessible by each and every person on the planet with access to a computer and the Internet. I don’t know the business of getting into an academic journal, so I don’t know if there is money involved. If so, maybe that’s what is keeping these authors in relative secrecy, but I hope that something can be done in the future to bring them to the forefront.
Like many others, I have not heard of any of these leaders. It reinforces a conversation I had a with a colleague last spring regarding how to wield the most influence on change in the classroom. The conclusion was stay away from university professorships because of the distance from the classroom.
We fight this “war” on too many fronts.
Thanks, all, for continuing this conversation here and on Twitter. Let me make a few additional points/clarifications.
First, I could have linked to each of those professors university webpages, which would likely include a listing (with no links) of their publications. But, why would I do that? And, I could provide a list of books and articles by those folks that I think are most noteworthy, but I chose to take the Dan Meyer’s “be less helpful” approach.
Second, on Twitter, Dave Cormier wrote that this post “establishes that publishing /= dissemination. is there a responsibility to make sure that people see it?” Relatedly, Doug Belshaw wrote, “If I’m expected to go where they go (http://dougbelshaw.com/thesis) then they need to come where I am (Twitter, blogs, etc.)
” I don’t think professors OWE us anything, and I don’t think professors have to use social media. However, IF they want to share their knowledge as widely and broadly as possible, they need to strongly consider their modes of dissemination. IF they care about more than just satisfying the criteria for tenure and promotion, then they need to strongly consider their modes of dissemination. But, knowing many of those folks, my sense is that they genuinely believe that they are disseminating widely through traditional publication means, but also through their teaching. Remember, please, that folks who read this blog represent a miniscule percentage of educators in the world. I guarantee that there are thousands of educators out there who have been informed in meaningful ways by these professors. They’ve done really important work and have shared that work with each other, but also with many, many sitting and aspiring school leaders in their local and regional area. So, do they OWE us anything? Do they NEED to be using social media? It all depends on how much they care about getting their message out.
Yes, this post is mostly about how professors of educational leadership have failed to consider the possibilities for disseminating their good work more broadly. But, point #2 is pretty important, too. Not ALL of what these folks have done is behind some proprietary database. How many of you have read “Using Equity Audits to Create Equitable and Excellent Schools” by Linda Skrla et al.? (http://bit.ly/94Uvzd). And, how many of you have read [insert pop-psychology/ marketing book here]? Skrla et al.’s book is a really important and VERY practical (yes, practical!) book about taking stock of how equitably your school is providing services and producing outcomes. I’d be that anyone who has ever done work around data-driven decision-making has read a book by Mike Schmoker or Virginia Bernhardt. But, have you read anything by Jeff Wayman? He’s got a bunch of stuff freely available here: http://edadmin.edb.utexas.edu/datause/
See, getting people to publish in the open is a step. But, that still doesn’t guarantee that people will read it. Here is a list of 356 open access journals in education. http://www.doaj.org/doaj?func=subject&cpid=127
How many of you have ever ready anything in there?
I could pick on who gets to declare these people the leaders, and why being a professor is a prerequisite, and what possible difference the “junior/senior” split means, but all of that, I think, plays to the point.
We do a terrible job of spreading information. The communications technology of the past 500 years has hurt us – printing was expensive, dissemination difficult, libraries cloistered more information than they spread – but in this century those excuses should be gone.
So whether it is these lists, or my own (which might include a lot of non-PhD practitioner/thinkers), they key is to publish open, to publish widely, to use Social Media to inform widely, to write less academically, to engage not just in “responsible conduct of research” but “responsible writing of research.”
I know I hurt my “academic reputation,” but I spend much more time blogging than writing for journals. The audience is far larger and more diverse, the peer review far more interesting and valuable to me.
Information wants to be free. Educators, tear down these pay walls.
Very interesting article and I agree with much of what you say, especially about Open Publishing. It made me think about work that is going on in public engagement with science see http://www.publicengagement.ac.uk/our-projects/science-engagement Excellent research and scholarship should inform policy and practice, and that takes work by the researchers, scholars, policy-makers and practitioners – all of us. Obviously the researchers and scholars have a duty to make their work as available as possible to those who need it, and that may require (re-)writing in an accessible style, open access publishing, using broadcast and social media effectively – this being a good example http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j50ZssEojtM . But one of the real joys of social media is that we can all play an active role not just as readers but also as bloggers, tweeters of the original and intermediate content so that dissemination becomes a network activity. I don’t see this as following automatically from increased use of Open Access journals ( a long term project). The blogosphere can be as much as a silo as traditional publishing. If you look at Figs 2 and 3 in this paper you will see that scholars of connectivism and Actor Network Theory weren’t really ‘connecting’.
Ooops – forgot link in last comment http://www.lancs.ac.uk/fss/organisations/netlc/past/nlc2010/abstracts/PDFs/Bell.pdf
The power of communication in social media – I found it ironic that I had not heard of the people on your list, but recognised two of the folk mentioned in the posting and your comment later (@dougbelshaw and @irasocol – both good ‘follows’).
Great post Jon! As a previous principal and current Ph.D student in Ed. Leadership, I know none of the individuals you named and I consider myself connected! Hmmmm…..maybe I should consider moving back into K-12 education!
I’m terribly late to respond, but have been thinking about this post since you wrote it.
It’s of no surprise to you that this is my favorite quote:
“If you’re serious about school reform, stop reading pop-psychology and marketing books written by people who wouldn’t know John Dewey from John Stamos.”
It drives me nuts that we have more educators following these pop-culture figures than the leaders you mentioned (many of whom I don’t know, but I did recognize 3 so I don’t feel too guilty considering Ed Leadership is not my specialty). But as you and others have pointed out, the pop-psych and marketing books are more widely disseminated, more easily accessible, and their authors distribute golden nuggets of “wisdom” in pithy epithets, which desperate educators (leaders and non-leaders alike) cling to for dear life.
You mentioned above that you’re going to work with other leaders at CASTLE to “bridge some gaps” — my question is what can the rest of us do to bridge this divide? Many administrators (and other educational leaders) don’t have access to the “closed” scholarly publications. Those of us who do can find and read them and ensure their ideas don’t wither and die in the PDFs they were published in, sure. Those who don’t have access can read the open access journals you linked to above.
And then what? Where’s the action that bridges that scholar/practitioner divide?
I’m not asking just to be a devil’s advocate; I’m genuinely asking what we can do to step forward, rather than just toss around good ideas and say, “hey, that’s great!” The fact is, much scholarly writing isn’t marketed well. Sometimes, it’s downright boring to read, even if it is full of great ideas — not exactly inspiring to most to get out there and DO something. I guess what I’m asking for is a call to action. What would you suggest?
Hi Adrienne,
I thought Jerrid Kruse was on to something with this blog:
http://researchtopractice.wordpress.com/
But, it needs some new life. It’s a simple concept, though. A multi-authored blog by credible producers and consumers of research that provides accessible summaries, critiques, etc. of research.
It’d be a GREAT project for a group of education doc. students to organize. What do you think?
Thanks for reminding me about Jerrid’s blog – I did know of it but hadn’t thought of it in a while. I agree; it’s credible, accessible, and definitely a good start. I also know from previous conversations with Jerrid that he’s open to contributors. I’m going to mention it to a few of my colleagues here and see if anything catches on. Sadly, a characteristic of some academics is they are more interested in their research than they are in “real change” (I put that in quotation marks because I’m not even sure what I mean when I say that). But that’s not to say it ain’t worth tryin’…
Thanks for the push and the reminder.
Oh, and one more thing, Adrienne. If that multi-authored blog is built on WordPress, the newly developed plugin, Anthologize, adds some really interesting possibilities…
See: http://anthologize.org/
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