Preparing Instructional Leaders for Social Justice

Abstract

Neither providing a rhetoric of social justice in educational leadership preparation programs nor getting individual students to understand and to be committed to social justice is sufficient to enable them to succeed on the ground as leadership practitioners in creating socially just schools. They require additional practical knowledge, what might be called pragmatic knowledge, in various areas. One of these areas is instructional leadership; that is, how does the school leader facilitate teachers being successful in teaching literally all of their students well. This article offers a model of instructional leadership for social justice that school leaders can learn and apply. This pragmatic approach focuses on two specific teachable areas—equity consciousness and equity-oriented teaching skills.