Making the decision to continue learning and growing through the pursuit of a postgraduate degree and/or a doctorate will be one of the most challenging and complex, yet simultaneously intensely rewarding and beneficial of both your professional and personal life.
At the heart of education, especially when it comes to wanting to make real changes and improvements to how colleges and universities across the length and breadth of the United States and beyond, is the dual desire to learn and to teach.
With this in mind, continue reading for a comprehensive guide on how to connect academia with real-world situations through the pursuit of further education.
Principal Careers
The step from teacher to school, college, or university principal is one of the amazing opportunities and will afford you the opportunities to make bigger and more impactful strides forward to transform the educational system that simply cannot be feasibly achieved as a teacher.
The extra challenges you will face will match the extra rewards you will receive and is perhaps the most logical and most effective next step in your pursuit of making actual changes to the education system and how it is presented.
Additional roles and responsibilities of a principal include but are categorically in no way limited to:
- The use of your leadership knowledge and skills to guide teachers to together create an effective, safe and functional learning environment
- Networking and connecting with professional peers and other associates to ensure you are constantly updated and aware of any changes, advancements, and developments in all aspects of education
- Conflict resolution
- Ensuring the students and learners in your specific academic institution experience the highest levels of teaching possible
- Conducting and arranging regular school evaluations to quickly identify and improve any areas that are lacking in any way
- Always looking at ways to improve the standard of services
- Check all teachers in your specific academic institution have any and all resources needed to meet every requirement set by the curriculum
- Providing academic support to teachers and students alike
- Arranging and conducting meetings with students’ parents as and when required
- Officially representing the college or university at events and conferences
- Ensuring all procedures, rules, and policies are always adhered to and all government requirements are met
- Managing and planning building repairs and maintenance
- Being active and effective in the community
Becoming the principal of a high school, college or university means also becoming the proverbial face of the academic institution and, as such, will set you in a prime position to meet with educational leaders, other school principals, and even influential members of the government’s educational sector and begin to instigate change.
Educational Leadership
Professional and fully qualified teachers and principals who are already working either in a high school, college or university have a myriad of proverbial hoops to jump through in terms of hitting targets and academic goals set by that particular institution.
However, the real targets are set by the educational leaders and managers far above the paygrade of the college and university administrators. If you want to make a serious impact on the standards and academic goalposts that teachers have to adhere to, then it is necessary and strongly advisable to look into educational leadership.
Postgraduate Degrees In Education and Leadership
After the successful acquisition of an undergraduate bachelor’s degree in your chosen area of teaching (and presumably, the accompanying teacher’s certificate), it is common for ambitious teachers, after having been professionally working in the role for several years or more, to enroll on a postgraduate degree program.
Master’s degrees in educational leadership and similar are specifically designed for such educational professionals who are focused on attaining a more leadership-based role in the educational sector.
It is usual for leading academics in school improvement, leadership, and management to heavily contribute to both the course content and as guest speakers. `In addition, other senior experts in education, such as policymakers, inspectors, principals, and local authority officers, are often also involved in postgraduate programs.
Obviously and quite naturally, each education and leadership postgraduate degree varies from institution to institution; however, there are certainly some aims shared between each program.
The generally uniformed aims and objectives of the majority of postgraduate master’s programs include:
- Developing an understanding of the main issues of leadership that influence and inform the ability to perform and the performance of teachers and other educational professionals
- Developing your own personal practical and theoretical approaches to how to make effective and impactful changes to improve the way schools operate and teachers teach
- Examining the present theories and practices for analyzing and improving educational practices and policies all from a leadership perspective
- Learning how to help colleagues and other educational professionals to develop their own ideas and ways to improve how the school runs
- Learning how to integrate academia with the changing trends and issues of the modern world
Doctorates In Education And Leadership
Making the step to gain a Ph.D.` and study education and leadership at the doctorate level is by no means just one step up from a postgraduate course and rather is a hugely different way of learning.
If you choose to effectively balance your current working commitments and personal responsibilities while studying and researching for your Ph.D. by studying online, then you will also be offered a more flexible learning platform and work when you have proper time and can concentrate.
Under the proverbial umbrella of an education and leadership degree, even though different institutions vary, there are a standard set of modules that are likely to be incredibly similar.
Education And Psychology
Essentially, the education and psychology module is wholly concentrated around the critical interrogation and application of different psychological methodologies and theories to inform and aid interrogation of and provision of issues, inequalities, and processes from an educational perspective.
Subject areas that are intensely explored and dissected within the education and psychology module of a doctorate of educational leadership and themes that occur within each Ph.D. course of study usually involve the following:
- Using either randomly designed or quasi-experimental methods to evaluate all preventative interventions which are wholly school-based
- Young people, children, and mature students’ emotional and mental health
- ADHD and autism study
- Possible digitally based outcomes of therapeutic support
- Supporting the mental health and wellbeing of students in schools with the specific focus on a context of austerity
- Exploring the formulation and engagement of and with educational needs such as ‘special’ and ‘additional’ classifications
Ethical Leadership & Social Justice
Another exceedingly interesting module of the most prestigious and renowned Ph.D. Education and Leadership doctoral programs are that of the ethical leadership and social justice module. Such modules are tailor-made to arm future ethical leaders in education and often involve the following research topics and studies:
- Taking a more global overview and outlook of leadership, ethics, and education issues
- Reflecting on the way that you present both yourself and your findings within a leadership role and context and how you intend to best use innovative methods to meet the needs of students through inclusion and diversity
- Exploring traditional and more innovative ideologies which are philosophically based and at the true heart of educational thinking
- Critically engaging and focusing on systematic changes, policies, and reforms can pose certain dilemmas of an ethical nature and that can positively, or conversely, impact the leadership of schools and the way in which teachers work.
Effective Leadership In Education & Beyond
Effective leadership is naturally part and parcel of every doctorate in education and educational leadership, and part of your Ph.D., which will certainly be mandatory to refer to when it comes to writing your dissertation, is that of examining what it means to be an effective leader who is a beacon and catalyst for change, within an educational setting and beyond.
Questions and issues explored within the effective leadership module will likely involve the following:
- How do different contexts, academic institutions, and subject matters affect different approaches and your personal approaches in relation to improving and expanding your leadership qualities
- What it means to become a successful and effective leader, with a particular leaning towards the education system
- The true and precise meaning of learning communities with a collaborative edge
- The models of educational leadership that are most effective in improving and cultivating learning communities with a collaborative edge
- The precise skills needed to become an effective leader
Other Standardized Modules
In addition to the ones discussed above, there is also a plethora of other standardized sections of your Ph.D. that you will most likely encounter at some point or even study in-depth as part of your research studies.
School Improvement and School Effectiveness
In school improvement and school effectiveness modules, you will learn about the overall impact of education and teachers both nationally and internationally, as well as ascertaining exactly what ‘improvement’ means in the context of teaching and education.
Culture, Commitments, and Schools
In the culture, commitment, and school modules, you will be expected to explain, analyze and justify what you believe, in more of a philosophical context, what a ‘school’ is and what you believe to the underlying philosophy and ethos behind the word. In addition, the contributions of each group in the school setting are analyzed, including teachers, students, parents, and the parent-teacher association groups.
Leadership For Learning
The conceptual framework of leadership for learning is nearly always heavily focused on at various points throughout the Ph.D. course, and this framework is applied to both the exploration of current educational standards as well as your own personal attitude and application of teaching tools and techniques.
Educational Policy
The module on educational policy concentrates on how the educational sector of each nation contrasts and compares with each other and, moreover the way that the educational journey of a learner is broken up and approached over and within each school year.
System Leadership and Networking
Another incredibly frequently found module within most Educational Leadership PhDs is that of system leadership and networking, which examines the concept of leadership itself, both on a personal and individual level and in groups of people, namely students.
The Evaluation Of Education
This module centers on the wide plethora of issues and components that make up the complete student journey, from early school years through to high school graduation.
Choosing The Right College For Your Doctorate
Having made the decision to further your academic career exponentially by choosing to study for an educational doctorate degree, it is important to select a prestigious and established institution. Click Here to discover more about the supreme benefits of such an intense and challenging doctorate.
It would be logical to assume that if you are currently in the position of researching a doctorate in education and leadership, you are currently working as a teacher or in a related field. Naturally then, it would understandably be impractical to be able to physically attend
If you do decide to undertake your doctorate degree through a prestigious online academic provider, or else try and fit physical attendance with your other professional and personal obligations, then there is a myriad of different credentials and attributes that the right academic institution supplying your doctorate course should provide:
- Although academic rankings are important, you should not immediately discredit a particular Ph.D. course on this alone, and conversely, if a particular course appears to be widely accredited, it is still important to find out what the syllabus involves
- If you have only recently finished your master’s degree, it is a good idea to study for your Ph.D. at a different academic institution in order to make new connections and expose yourself to different guest speakers and ways of research
- Regular and various academic professionals in a wide range of fields who offer guest talks, lectures, and even mentorship options
- Transparent information, either on the school’s website or else upon request on the phone or by post, about the present faculty members and the opportunity to find each of their credentials
- Plenty of student resources and student support services
- Different options for the final dissertation
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