Penn GSE Professor, Students to Help Shape Next Generation of School Leaders in France
Contact: Jacqueline Jircitano | Communications Manager, CPRE | E: jji@gse.upenn.edu | P: (215) 573-0700 ext. 231
For Immediate Release: March 26, 2013
Penn GSE Professor, Students to Help Shape Next Generationof School Leaders in France
Philadelphia, PA – Dr. Jonathan Supovitz, associate professor of Education Leadership at the University of Pennsylvania, Graduate School of Education (Penn GSE) and co-director of the Consortium for Policy Research in Education (CPRE), will lead ten students from Penn GSE’s Mid-Career Doctoral Program in Educational Leadership in an international exchange of knowledge and practice. Supovitz and the doctoral students, who are current school principals and administrators, will participate in a regional training workshop for French principals at the École Normale Supérieure de Lyon-Institut Français de l’Éducation in Lyon, France, from April 2 through April 5, 2013. The workshop, entitled “School Improvement and Leadership to Raise Student Achievement”, will explore the theme of transformational leadership for instructional improvement.
Supovitz and students will organize and deliver several sessions for attendees of the two-day workshop. Other workshop speakers and participants will include French policymakers; researchers from France, Belgium, Germany, and Portugal; local practicing school and district leaders; representatives from the American consulate in France; and members of the Fulbright Foundation. The Penn GSE team will also spend two days visiting local schools with French principals-in-training to observe strategies currently being used to enact transformational leadership. As a result of the school visits, they will develop workshops to share ideas and strategies with their French peers as well as their colleagues when they return to the United States.
Participants of the workshop anticipate that the experience will help create a set of ideas and practices that they can employ in their own schools, both in France and in the United States. As a result of the visit, the Penn GSE team will establish a network for on-going collaboration between developing French principals and the students and professors at Penn GSE. Continued collaboration will allow Penn GSE’s student leaders to shape a new generation of leadership in French schools.
A reciprocal visit for French principals and district leaders is planned to take place in Philadelphia, PA in Fall 2013. For more information, visit the Penn French-American Educational Leadership Knowledge Exchange blog or follow the conversation using #pennlyon13 on Twitter.
Dr. Supovitz is the author of several books and published research articles on instructional leadership, distributed leadership, and teacher leadership. He is also a founder, teacher, and steering committee member of Penn GSE’s Mid-Career Doctoral Program in Educational Leadership. The exchange was arranged with help from Jean-Louis Derouet, a professor of sociology of education at the National Institute for Research in Education in Lyon, France. He is the chief editor of Éducation et Sociétés, an international journal of education and also coordinates the Network of European Experts in the Social Sciences of Education (NESSE).
About Penn GSE
Penn GSE is one of the nation’s premier research ed schools. A small percentage of education programs in the U.S. offer doctoral degrees, with only a tiny fraction located at flagship research universities. No other education school enjoys a University environment as supportive of practical knowledge-building as the University of Pennsylvania. Penn GSE has long been known for excellence in qualitative research, language and literacy studies, practitioner inquiry and teacher education. Over the past 15 years, Penn GSE has also developed remarkable strengths in quantitative research, policy studies, evaluation, higher education, and psychology and human development. The School is notably entrepreneurial, launching innovative degree programs for practicing professionals and unique partnerships with local educators. For further information about Penn GSE, please visit www.gse.upenn.edu.
About CPRE
The Consortium for Policy Research in Education (CPRE) brings together talented experts from major American research universities who employ a range of innovative research methods to investigate pressing problems in education today. CPRE work contributes important evidence-based knowledge that informs contemporary problems of education policy and practice. Member universities include the University of Pennsylvania; Teachers College, Columbia University; Harvard University; Stanford University; University of Michigan; University of Wisconsin-Madison; and Northwestern University. For further information about CPRE, please visit www.cpre.org.
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