Online Professional Development for School Leaders: Improving Support to Address Novice Teachers’ Professional Learning Needs
Abstract: Leaders serve an important role in shaping school structure and culture to support novice teachers (Birkeland & Feiman-Nemser, 2012). Drawing on distributed leadership (Leithwood, Mascall, & Strauss, 2009; Spillane, 2004) and its implications for leadership development (Bennett, Wise, Woods, & Harvey, 2003), researchers conducted a survey to examine the structure of teacher induction in U.S. schools and to investigate leaders’ interest in receiving online professional development focused on supporting novice teachers. A variety of district and school personnel support novice teachers. Participating leaders and novice teachers agree that providing leaders professional development on novice teacher support will improve teacher induction. Although e-learning can support professional development efforts, leaders prefer resources that can be used to accomplish work associated with teacher induction, as opposed to e-learning that primarily delivers instruction and encourages reflection.
Presider: Eric Brewster, Johannes Kepler University Linz