Becoming a Leader of Content Knowledge

For the last decade, policy makers and boards of education have been mandating and searching for school leaders who are knowledgeable about curriculum and instruction or what the reform literature terms instructional leadership. The recognition that expertise in teaching and learning is critical to the achievement in our schools, however, has often been overwhelmed by the management functions of administration and programs in educational administration, which continue to support the role of manager, and provides little, if any, substance for the kinds of knowledge and skills necessary to lead a school instructionally. Recent studies of the instructional leadership contend that the content that has been neglected in the training of administrators is an understanding of subject matter and how an educational leader must transform the theories, ideas, and practices of a subject or discipline into the everyday understandings of classroom teaching. Although the new construct of Leadership Content Knowledge (LDK) provides a new understanding about what leaders need to know about teaching and learning in order to effectively perform the role of instructional leader, the studies of LDK have not yet provided a process for becoming a leader of content knowledge. The author describes a framework for how an educational administrator would become a “Leader of Content Knowledge.”