Supporting Effective Teaching in Tennessee: Executive Summary | Page 24

development opportunities they need
to be most successful. Specifically,
superintendents, principals, and teachers
have made it clear they view most existing
administrative training programs as
largely ineffective. This is at least in
part because many teachers enter these
programs not because they want to be
administrators but simply because they
want to receive a salary increase, as having
an administrative license significantly
increases a teacher’s salary on the state
salary schedule even if the teacher does
not actually become an administrator.

P R I n C I Pa l S a R E n O T
RECEIVIng ThE T yPE
Of TR aInIng and
PROfESSIOnal dEVElOPmEnT
OPPORTunITIES ThEy nEEd
TO bE mOST SuCCESSful .

While Tennessee is fortunate to have a new policy around
leadership development, the challenge will be transferring this
policy into practice. The state has several blocks on which to
build. First, all supervisors, principals, and assistant principals
in the state are required every two years to attend 28 hours
of professional development approved by the Tennessee
Department of Education’s Tennessee Academy for School
Leaders (TASL). In addition to improving districts’ and
other organizations’ professional development programs,
TASL itself runs several professional development
programs, including intensive training programs for new
supervisors, principals, and assistant principals. As with
most professional development opportunities, informal
discussions suggest the quality of TASL-approved
programs varies widely. A second building block is the
new online training modules for principals currently
being developed in partnership by the Tennessee
Principals Association and the Niswonger Foundation.
These training modules are still in the very early phases
of development, and all parties agree they will need to
be supplemented by on-the-ground mentoring and
training. Finally, many of the state’s largest districts have
either created or are considering creating comprehensive
principal training programs. Several of these programs
are highlighted as statewide “promising practices”
on page 48. Together, these programs could become
the infrastructure for regional principal development
programs that together serve the entire state.
Courtesy of Chris Walker

To address these problems, the Tennessee
Higher Education Commission and the
State Board of Education worked with
the Southern Regional Education Board
(SREB) to develop and approve a new comprehensive principal
development policy, called the Learning Centered Leadership
(LCL) system. On paper, the policy, which took four years
to develop, is one of the best principal development policies
in the country. The core of the system is the new Tennessee
Instructional Leadership Standards (TILS), which outline four
levels of mastery on each of the seven competency areas outlined
in the standards. These four levels of mastery correspond to the

four new levels of principal licenses: the
aspiring license (ILL-A), the beginning
license (ILL-B), the professional license
(ILL-P), and the exemplary license
(ILL-E). Districts are required to sign
“partnership agreements” with higher
education institutions outlining how the
district and higher education institution
will work together to develop principal
preparation programs that prepare leaders
to meet these new standards. These new
programs must include meaningful
field-experiences and individual mentors
for each principal candidate. The LCL
system also includes a new evaluation tool
that contains a detailed rubric outlining
what aspiring, beginning, professional,
and exemplary mastery look like on each
dimension of the standards.32

Knox County Schools Superintendent and SCORE Steering Committee
member Jim McIntyre tours a class at Holston Middle School on May 5, 2009.

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