Going to the Balcony: Two Professors Reflect and Examine Their Pedagogy

Abstract

The purpose of this essay is twofold. First of all, we want to emphasize the value of taking time to reflect on the effectiveness of our teaching practices, especially when we sense that teaching and learning processes have become 'stale.' Heifetz and Linsky (2002) equate reflection with "going to the balcony from the dance floor" to view our actions from a different perspective, and this is what we attempted to do. Secondly, we want to highlight the professional and personal satisfaction that can result from collaboration with a colleague when investigating elements of the scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL). To give you some background, let us describe how we evolved into this "balcony" place. We share a common history, having been elementary school principals in Illinois for many years. While leading our schools, we also completed our doctoral degrees at Illinois State University under the same advisor. We became friends through serving on the executive board of Illinois Women in Educational Leadership organization and nurtured our friendship by attending professional conferences together and conducting a joint research project. We both transitioned to teaching Educational Leadership at the university level in Illinois, but Linda moved to Alabama in 2005. Our research and collaboration on mentoring aspiring school leaders continued "across state lines" and has expanded over the last five years with additional national presentations and publications. Research has shown that future leaders who understand the professional and personal benefits of actively seeking out mentors throughout their careers will likely achieve higher levels of success (Allen, et al., 2004). We acknowledge this fact, and have developed a conviction that our educational leadership graduate students at our respective universities in Illinois and Alabama need to prepare themselves for mentoring relationships. Over the past six years, we have investigated protégé preparation for graduate students preparing to become school leaders. We have published several manuscripts on the topic (Tripses, Searby, & Karanovich, 2010; Tripses & Searby, 2008; Searby & Tripses, 2006) and conducted numerous peer reviewed presentations. We have collaborated on curriculum and instructional strategies focused on developing our students' capacities as protégés for their future mentoring relationships. We gave our students an identical assignment to seek a mentor for themselves and write a reflection paper on their experience. And finally, on two occasions we used distance technology to bring Illinois and Alabama administrator preparation classrooms together for common class sessions on protégé development. The