School Leadership

Quality Measures

Principal Preparation Program Self-Study Toolkit—12th Edition

This self-assessment toolkit can help principal preparation program leaders and others assess the quality of pre-service principal training.

January 2022

Download Report

A principal stands among students in a classroom.

Table of Contents

Overview

Research Approach

Ideas In Practice

Author(s)
C.L. King

Publisher(s)
Education Development Center, Inc.

Page Count 47 pages

Summary

How we did this

The Quality Measures Toolkit draws on nearly two decades of research about high-quality principal preparation, in general, and the preparation of equity-centered principals. This research includes hundreds of research studies, white papers, and frameworks.

The Quality Measures Toolkit is designed to help school district representatives and/or others assess and improve the quality of the training that programs provide to aspiring principals. This is the most recent update of a product originally released in 2009.

The heart of the kit is a detailed self-assessment form, with ratings on a scale of one to four. Users can fill out the form to help them identify the strengths and weaknesses of the programming. There is a rubric for each of the following program domains:

Candidate Admissions
Coursework
Pedagogy-Andragogy
Clinical Practice
Performance Assessment
Graduate Performance Outcomes

Each domain identifies five to seven indicators of high-quality practice. Taken together, these criteria offer a comprehensive description of high-quality preparation of equity-centered principals.

The self-assessment is designed to be conducted with the help of a “facilitator." This is a professional trained to guide participants through its parts from a position of neutrality. The toolkit could also be useful to those who want to learn about the kinds of research-based elements that make up program quality and get an idea of program improvement areas.

Key Takeaways

The Quality Measures toolkit is a set of rubrics for assessment of principal preparation programs.
It looks at programming in six areas, including admissions, clinical practice, and coursework.
The toolkit is designed to be used by principal preparation self-study teams as a basis for collaborative reflection on the program's current design and implementation. Self-study teams typically consist of program faculty, affiliated school district representatives, and other program stakeholders.