Coaching, professional community, and continuous improvement: rural school leader and coach development in a research-practice partnership

ABSTRACT

The increased need for effective school leadership development, especially in rural and high-needs schools, has led to an increase in research-practice partnerships between districts and universities. Yet, there is a need for systematic analysis of the outcomes of such partnerships. The purpose of this paper is to examine the influence of a leadership development initiative on 16 school leaders and eight leadership coaches and their leadership and leadership coaching practices. The initiative, the Leadership Learning Community (LLC), was created through a research-practice partnership between a consortium of 12 predominantly rural, high-poverty school districts and two universities to meet the districts’ leadership development needs. The results of the study demonstrate the benefits of rural school districts partnering with other districts and universities to provide cross-district leadership development through facilitated professional communities and job-embedded coaching to develop rural school leaders and coaches able to lead continuous school improvement efforts.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. The National Center for Education Statistics’ (NCES) urban-centric locale categories are utilized in this study. According to this NCES classification, rural areas are those that do not lie inside an urbanized area or cluster, therefore consisting of fewer than 2,500 people. Rural areas are further broken into three subcategories (fringe, distant, and remote) based on proximity to an urbanized area or cluster (National Center for Education Statistics, 2013).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Hans W. Klar

Hans W. Klar, PhD, is an associate professor and assistant department chair in the Department of Educational and Organizational Leadership Development in the College of Education at Clemson University. His research, teaching, and service are focused on developing distributed instructional leadership capacity for improving teaching and learning in high-needs schools. He also works to assist rural school districts in meeting their leadership development needs through research-practice partnerships.

Kristin Shawn Huggins

Kristin Shawn Huggins, PhD, is an associate professor in the Department of Educational Leadership and Sport Management in the College of Education at Washington State University. Her research, teaching, and service are focused on leadership development for curricular and instructional improvement, especially in under-resourced contexts. She is specifically interested in how research-practice partnerships can meet context-based school and district improvement needs.

Parker M. Andreoli

Parker M. Andreoli is a graduate research assistant and doctoral candidate in the College of Education at Clemson University. Her research interests center on successful leadership practices and transformative learning experiences for school leaders. She is particularly interested in how school leaders enact change to narrow opportunity gaps for marginalized populations of students.