An Innovative Principal Program in New Jersey

Two years ago, 180 school administrators in New Jersey  enrolled in a series of courses to teach them to do a better job of reaching young learners. Today several of those administrators say that the courses led them to experience “lightbulb” moments in which they recognized not only the importance of early learning, but the role they should play in fostering it.

The New Jersey series, called the PreK-3rd Leadership Training Series, exposed them to the latest research on how young children learn and introduced them to new tools for creating a more continuous system of early education, from pre-k through the third grade. It is among the first state-wide programs in the country to recognize the importance of professional development in early childhood for school administrators.  The program is now the subject of a case study by Cynthia Rice, senior policy analyst for the Advocates for the Children of New Jersey, and Vincent Costanza, an early childhood official at the New Jersey Department of Education.

School district administrators are “in the best position to successfully develop a strong early learning platform that builds upon children’s educational experiences from year to year,” Rice and Costanza wrote.  Yet “few professional development opportunities currently exist for district leaders to acquire the ‘know how’ in leading their staffs toward this goal.”

Many principals, according to the report, have never taught in classrooms below the third grade, nor had the chance to immerse themselves in the differences in cognitive and social development between, say, a 5-year-old and a 9-year-old. But the course’s curriculum was not only about child development. It also focused on several management and structural changes that foster PreK-3^rd approaches based on research by Kristie Kauerz of the Harvard Graduate School of Education.

The program consisted of four-day sessions spread across five months and held at various places around the state. It was created by three organizations — Advocates for Children of New Jersey (ACNJ), the New Jersey Department of Education, Division of Early Childhood Education (DECE) and the New Jersey Principals and Supervisors Association (NJPSA), and the authors write that part of its success is attributable to the collaboration among these three players.

The case study provides a roadmap for other states who may want to embark on such a program. And it also illuminates how much support administrators need. For example, results from surveys administered to participants at first session showed that nearly half the participants (the largest share of whom were principals) said they communicated “very little” or “not at all” with the community-based preschools nearby. “The disconnect was even more apparent in school districts with no public preschool programs,” Rice and Costanza wrote.

The study also shows how much principals might benefit from a greater understanding of program assessment tools like the Classroom Assessment Scoring System that measures interactions in the classroom that correlate with effective teaching.

So far, results of the program are positive, though they are based entirely on self-reported answers from the attendees. In addition to describing their “lightbulb” moments, about 60 percent of respondents said they were communicating more with child care and/or Head Start programs in their community since they participated in the training series. Over half said they planned to implement PreK-3^rd reform strategies that were not currently available in their school, with 47 percent saying that these plans were a direct result of their participation in the series.

It will be interesting to see, down the road, whether these programs might be related to better teaching practices and student learning outcomes in the coming years.  If the lessons learned in these courses can be sustained over time and spread from district to district, they may go a long way in improving the culture of teaching and learning within preK-3^rd classrooms around the state.