EDU 730 Effective Educational Systems
This course is designed to assist educational leaders in assessing needs and planning and communicating the importance and content of the effective school improvement plan. Building curriculum, designing instructional activities, maintaining positive school climate and assessing organizational performance through improvement planning are primary responsibilities of school/district leadership. This course will utilize an inquiry format into school effectiveness with students taking major responsibility for guiding the class discussion. The work will take a critical slant, interrogating traditional ideas about the means and ends of public education and proposing alternative solutions. This course is designed to encourage and assist students in deconstructing traditional ways of thinking about effectiveness and to critically examine traditional measures of effectiveness (i.e., assessment scores, dropout rates, etc.). The intent of the deconstruction and critical examination is not to diminish the importance of measuring school effectiveness, but rather to appreciate the inherent complexity of the issue and to understand and acknowledge relevant limitations in ways that can inform the work of scholarly practitioners.