| Society demands a high quality education for all its students. Although classroom teachers are responsible for providing academic excellence, school administrators, when they link their leadership roles to teaching and learning, can influence teachers' instructional practices. The purpose of this study was to examine how leadership content knowledge in literacy affected administrators' thinking about effective approaches to the supervision of standards-based literacy and how administrators' reports of their actions changed over the period of the intervention in leadership content knowledge in literacy. The study also addresses a major gap in the literature. To date, leadership content knowledge has mainly been studied in relation to mathematics. This study explored the concept of leadership content knowledge from a literacy perspective.; The study sample consisted of fifteen New Jersey elementary administrators and two New Jersey teachers who were preparing for administrative roles. These administrators participated in four three-hour professional development sessions, which were designed to develop administrators' leadership content knowledge in literacy. Data for the study were collected through three sources: a pre and post "Survey of Participants," and "Connecting to Practice" reflection response forms, which were completed by the participants at the end of each session.; This research was conducted in the tradition of design research (Cobb, Confrey, diSessa, Lehrer, & Schauble, 2003). Administrators participated in professional development that focused on ideas about literacy, learning, and teaching. The study accomplished two things. First, it helped to extend the study of leadership content knowledge to literacy. Secondly, it served as a pilot to demonstrate that an intervention related to leadership content knowledge in literacy could be developed and to suggest that it might benefit school administrators. Findings from the study strongly suggest that administrators who have a deep understanding of reading can better recognize and support excellent literacy teaching, as well as identify and correct instructional practices, which do not further children's literacy development. The findings also indicate that, over the course of the intervention, administrators became more proficient in observing in classrooms, providing meaningful literacy related professional development, attending to supportive literacy resources, and involving their teachers in collaborative discussions related to literacy issues. The findings suggest that, as administrators' understandings of reading increased, they made more informed administrative decisions and altered their administrative actions to reflect their new learning. |
