Professional Development | News

U Wisconsin-Madison Launches Web Version of School Administration Improvement Tool

• By Joshua Bolkan
• 03/07/14

Researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison have launched an online version of the Comprehensive Assessment of Leadership for Learning (CALL), a tool designed to help improve school administration.

Based on four years of research and tested at more than 200 schools across the United States, "CALL surveys all educators in the school to measure critical leadership practices and suggest strategies for school improvement," according to information on the tool's site. "Suitable for both elementary and secondary schools, CALL surveys all administrators, teachers, instructional support staff and student support staff concerning leadership practices throughout the school. Its purpose is improvement of student learning to support practitioners in their work, not performance evaluation of employees."

After the assessment is complete, administrators receive formative feedback with action plans, school improvement strategies and linked resources for professional development.

"We chose CALL because it aims to measure distributed leadership, making it a direct match with our leadership development model," said Leslie Hazle Bussey, chief of staff at Georgia Leadership Institute for School Improvement, which recently deployed CALL in five of its schools. "We needed a reliable research-based measure that can tell us how well the skills and strategies we teach leaders is cascaded into practice with their teacher teams. As a bonus, our principals and coaches can access the data immediately and begin using it to guide planning and learning."

Visit leadershipforlearning.org for more information.