UMass Boston

Course Overview

Description

This course, offered in the first summer, focuses on the knowledge, skills, attitudes and behaviors that participants in the doctoral program need to develop or acquire to be effective leaders in promoting organizational changes in schools. Participants explore five interrelated facets of their own leadership development: 1) their operating conceptions and definitions of leadership and their set of understandings and beliefs about organizations, change and leadership; 2) their visions and goals for schools and why those goals are important to them; 3) their individual, interpersonal and group skills, including their sensitivity to how issues of race, ethnicity, class and gender affect these; 4) the organizational and broader sociocultural contexts in which they work and their understandings about how these contexts affect issues of leadership and organizational change; and 5) their personal journey toward leadership roles in schools, including their own history and how it is affected by their cultural background, their self-assessment of their strengths and weaknesses and their plans for personal learning. Participants develop a leadership and learning portfolio, which is added to and modified over the course of their doctoral work.