·      Does your state professional development system explicitly provide opportunities for leadership development, or “grooming”, such as program leadership mentoring, public policy leadership development, and state-level program management training?
·      What are other ways that those who want to be leaders acquire these skills? Does our field have formal or informal apprenticeships? Internships? Leadership seminars?
Greetings, Mike Grossman from Delaware,
Delaware does not provide explicit, but informal – on the job – inconsistent, leadership training. This was the stated problem in my very recently defended doctoral dissertation. I utilized a survey instrument that was developed by DAEL and sponsored by USDOE called Management Competencies Assessment Instrument and Performance Indicators for the Improvement of Adult Education Programs (2002). The original instrument has 21 competencies; I chose to use only the first 9 addressing leadership. There were 31 participants, adult ed leaders in DE, 29 of which I was able to conduct personal interviews with as a follow –up. Data gathered from the survey included relevance rankings for competencies and self-assessments for each competency, reported in aggregate. The ‘gaps’ between the two were analyzed, and the largest gaps were recommended areas for statewide professional development. The largest gaps included: 1) involving staff in decision-making, 2) advocacy for adult ed at the local, state, and fed level, and 3) compiles and uses need assessments to determine staff, learner and community needs.
As an adult ed community, we have adopted the original 21 competencies as the Delaware Adult Education Leadership Standards and have begun planning for professional development based on the findings from the study. We hope to soon expand our online capabilities in concert with a more personal mentoring and cohort atmosphere for newly hired leaders. The Standards will be our structure for monitoring program improvement and the basis for professional development.
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