Teaching

I’ve always wanted to be a teacher, and I have been teaching since the early 1980s in high school, college, University and on-line environments. At Madison, I try to integrate by interests in technology, design, cognitive theory, philosophy and practice into my courses.  Here are some of my courses:

844 – Technology and School Leadership
The role of technology in school leadership has changed in recent years from supporting the technologies school leaders and teachers use in their work to how leaders develop and manage complex technological systems to effect change in schools. School leaders need to understand how technologies facilitate the exchange of these data and how to make data useful to teachers.These rising expectations for technology leaders have been enabled by the incredible expansion in the capacity of technologies to communicate, represent and store information.  This class discusses the technologies that frame current leadership practices in schools, as well as technologies that point toward the future of teaching and learning in and out of schools.

845 – School Level Leadership
This course addresses how leaders improve the core practices of teaching and learning in schools. School leadership, management and leadership form a complementary relation in schools – management is necessary to create and promote stable conditions for teaching and learning, and leadership is necessary to envision and guide a school toward new frontiers of teaching and learning.  The class focuses on the idea of distributed leadership. We will discuss how distributed leadership describes how leadership is shared across a building, and, more importantly, across the network of structures, policies and tools that constitute the local system of practice. Much of the intentional work of school leaders involves redesigning and refining this system of practice to improve teaching and learning in the school.

 703 – Evaluating Teaching
This class is designed to teach students to support teaching practice through a) critiquing, annotating and constructing video-based representations of classroom teaching, and b) developing multimedia tools that simulate how to talk with teachers about their teaching. ELPA 703 will engage students in a learning-by-doing environment through which they will not only be able to collaboratively review video in terms of widely accepted teacher evaluation frameworks, but will acquire the abilities to use video to support teachers in local educational environments. Using videos to training school leaders how to recognize teacher quality will greatly enhance the ability to support teachers in documenting teaching practice and in providing meaningful feedback.

700 – Introduction to Inquiry
This course provides students with an introduction to inquiry in the field of educational policy and leadership. The course is organized around critical readings, discussions and activities that will invite students to view their doctoral program as an ongoing journey of engagement with ideas—from identifying and crystallizing meaningful problems to designing research to addressing key challenges in conducting meaningful and disciplined inquiry—and provides them with the basic knowledge and skills to begin that journey.  The course will provide an opportunity for class members to develop professional peer relationships (especially through providing and receiving formative feedback) that cultivate a mutually reinforcing teaching and learning community for the duration of their doctoral study.