Educational Leadership Development in USA and Arabian Gulf counties: preparing Successful School leaders

Abstract

The purpose of this comparative case study is to provide insight into the educational leadership preparation program that is provided at ABC in Arabian Gulf Country and XYZ in the United States to prepare educational leaders. The goal of this research is to understand the implications of any similarities or differences in the way that these leading universities prepare educational leaders as well as to identify opportunities for these universities to learn from each other in the spirit of continuous improvement. The primary data sources for this study were 45 minutes of personal interviews with four academic faculty and ten master’s students from educational leadership preparation programs at ABC and XYZ, and available documents about the master’s educational leadership program from both universities’ websites. The conceptual framework that I used to guide my research is a combination of the Analysis of Principal Preparation Programs (Webber &Scott, 2010) and the Participants’ Model for Developing Principals as Supervisors and Instructional Leaders (Taylor-Backor & Gordon, 2015). In addition to combining these two frameworks, I also included factors such as mission, vision, challenges, goals, areas of strengths, and areas of growth. The results of this research indicate that there are several similarities and differences between the two universities from both the academic faculty and graduate students’ perspectives in terms of (a) admission requirements, (b) curricula, (c) areas of strength and areas for growth, (d) challenges, as well as (e) opportunities for improvement, and (f) delivery modes of the educational leadership preparation program at their universities. 2

In addition, there are opportunities for learning for ABC university like a partnership. A partnership would be a good way for ABC university to visit XYZ university and learn from its experience in the activities that were given to students to do and even saw the designing of the schools. Moreover, it should include courses related to law and ethics in the master’s program that is offered at ABC university.