This module offers school principals and school librarians the opportunity to build and strengthen understanding and skills toward collaborative instruction with the school librarian and classroom faculty. This module is also appropriate for graduate candidates in school leadership and/or school librarian programs.This module is based on the British University learning model. In England, Small groups of learners meet once a week with a "tutor" - AKA professor to discuss relevant topics, share their work, submit assignments and get feedback. While the faculty suggests resources, learners are expected to conduct research to find their own. This model is especially applicable to school library and school principal candidates who need to build research skills for on-going professional development in the field. Librarians, of course, always need to hone their research skills.Like the British model, learning for this program is largely self-guided. Resources are provided for the learner to develop expertise demonstrated in three major assignments: a white paper, a tri-fold pamphlet, and an analysis of a case study.Candidates must demonstrate and justify competence in targeted ISLLC and ALA Standards to successfully complete the module. This competence is assessed by a rubric used by the candidate for self-assessment and by faculty for performance assessment .Because the learning for this module is largely self-guided, faculty needs to be available for consultation through regularly scheduled office hours and email. The goal of this consultation is to provide coaching and explanation. Faculty will use the Discussion Board Task as formative assessment to guide facilitated instruction and coaching. Summative assessment is demonstrated by the three artifacts produced in the module.

The purpose of this study was to examine the comparative influence of college administrator credential programs, on-the-job experiences, and the ISLLC Standards in the development of leadership expertise among urban public school principals. An exploratory, ex-post-facto research design used both quantitative and qualitative approaches. A survey of 101 randomly selected urban school principals from 25 of America’s largest metropolitan school districts was given, followed by telephone interviews with a subset of 20 randomly selected survey participants. Data were analyzed through the use of inferential and descriptive statistics and descriptive narratives. On-the-job experiences were significantly more important in developing leadership expertise than college credential programs on each of 41 ISLLC-based learning tasks. However, college credential programs are also important sources of leadership development. Several significant differences were found between comparative ratings of learning tasks by subgroups (experience, gender, school type). Respondents ranked 78% of the ISLLC Standards as very important to the field of school leadership. Interview subjects expressed concern about lack of preparation in budgeting, data analysis, teacher evaluation, and change management.