This study follows leadership candidates through the first phase of a comprehensive effort to reform master’s-level principal preparation at a large, urban California university. The reforms placed an 18-month field experience at the center of candidates’ preparation. Researchers sought to capture the changes over time in candidates’ beliefs about school leadership, commitment to the work of school leadership, knowledge of leadership practices that support improved teaching and learning, and capacity to apply those practices. The results reveal marked changes in the majority of candidates’ understandings of school leadership. They came to see the work as complex, with all aspects interrelated. They developed deeper recognition of the leader’s role in fostering trust and relationships, encouraging collaboration, and building leadership capacity within schools. They conceptualized data as powerful evidence to stimulate urgency for change, and they articulated greater confidence as leaders and change agents. Finally, candidates demonstrated increased understanding of, and ability to enact, specific leadership practices aimed at improving learning results for students in their schools.
It is widely accepted that unexpected sensory consequences of self‐action engage the cerebellum. However, we currently lack consensus on where in the cerebellum, we find fine‐grained differentiation to unexpected sensory feedback. This may result from methodological diversity in task‐based human neuroimaging studies that experimentally alter the quality of self‐generated sensory feedback. We gathered existing studies that manipulated sensory feedback using a variety of methodological approaches and performed activation likelihood estimation (ALE) meta‐analyses. Only half of these studies reported cerebellar activation with considerable variation in spatial location. Consequently, ALE analyses did not reveal significantly increased likelihood of activation in the cerebellum despite the broad scientific consensus of the cerebellum's involvement. In light of the high degree of methodological variability in published studies, we tested for statistical dependence between methodological factors that varied across the published studies. Experiments that elicited an adaptive response to continuously altered sensory feedback more frequently reported activation in the cerebellum than those experiments that did not induce adaptation. These findings may explain the surprisingly low rate of significant cerebellar activation across brain imaging studies investigating unexpected sensory feedback. Furthermore, limitations of functional magnetic resonance imaging to probe the cerebellum could play a role as climbing fiber activity associated with feedback error processing may not be captured by it. We provide methodological recommendations that may guide future studies.
Educational reform efforts in the United States have produced little sustainable results. Reformers are quick to impose standards and to label schools and the students they serve. Yet, they rarely acknowledge the serious inequities and inequalities found throughout the educational process. This article seeks to present a more comprehensive view of the collective disparities found in the American educational system, with the idea that “leaving no child behind” requires a serious attempt at leveling the playing field. Inherent in this presentation is the notion that reform efforts that produce real change must begin with public policy that acknowledges and removes the faults and errors of the system.
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