Historically, principals served as disciplinarians and the teachers' boss. Under current federal legislation, principals now must accept the responsibility to manage personnel, funds, and strategic planning. Today's principals also must accept responsibilities associated with being their schools' instructional leaders. As instructional leaders, principals maintain the responsibility for the learning of all students, including students with disabilities. This role becomes magnified in rural school systems that typically experience high rates of special education teacher attrition and educate a large percentage of students with disabilities. For these reasons, today's principal preparation programs need to reconsider and reconstruct philosophies and practices. In this article, the author discusses principals'contemporary responsibilities and provides suggestions for principal preparation programs to better prepare principals for today's roles and responsibilities of being the instructional leaders for students with disabilities.

Aim/Purpose: We sought to understand factors that dissuade engineering and computing doctoral students in the United States from pursuing a career in the professoriate. Background: Many PhD students start the doctoral process excited about the possibility of becoming a professor. After a few years of doctoral education, however, many become less interested in academic careers or even come to loathe the idea of a faculty position. Methodology: Participants in a larger study (N = 744) completed a comprehensive survey about their educational experiences and career aspirations. This study focused on a subset of these respondents (n = 147), who indicated they did not want to pursue faculty positions and explained their reasoning with a brief open-ended response. We coded these open-ended responses. Contribution: We found a general lack of interest in the professoriate and disgust over the associated pressure-filled norms and culture; this aversion is the article’s focus. Respondents were critical of institutional norms that emphasize research (e.g., stress related to grant writing, publishing, and promotion as junior faculty) and described their own experiences as PhD students. Findings: Findings support rethinking the outdated faculty model and interchanging it with healthier and more holistic approaches. Recommendations for Practitioners: These approaches might include advocating for and emphasizing the contributions of research, teaching, and professional excellence as well as removing the secrecy and toxicity of tenure and promotion that discourage individuals from becoming the next generation of engineering and computing educators and knowledge makers. Recommendation for Researchers: Future researchers should explore in greater depth the extent to which junior faculty’s experiences in the professoriate influence doctoral students’ and postdoctoral scholars’ attitudes toward working in academia. To the extent that this is the case, researchers should then explore ways of improving faculty experiences, in addition to improving doctoral students’ experiences that are unrelated to their socialization. Impact on Society: Having a deeper understanding of the reasons why some doctoral engineering and computing students are uninterested in the professoriate is critical for removing barriers toward becoming faculty. Future Research: Researchers should explore the factors that would improve doctoral students’ perceptions of the professoriate, and better understand how they might disproportionately affect members of historically underrepresented groups.

Instructional leaders must be proficient in their knowledge of effective instructional strategies in order foster an environment that uses what has been identified as “best-practice” for students with disabilities. This role is critical in rural school systems where principals take on more responsibility and the ability to employ highly qualified educators is often more difficult. The purpose of this multiple case study was to provide a detailed description of principals' understanding of effective instruction for students with disabilities in a rural mid-Atlantic school system. Results from three cases indicated that principals have a limited understanding of what effective instruction for students with disabilities encompasses and how to ensure its application.

Instructional leadership is the most important responsibility of today's principal, and no other group of students is in need of an effective instructional leader more than students with disabilities. Effective instructional leaders, especially for students with disabilities, create a supportive learning environment and school culture that promotes the education of all students. Furthermore, effective instructional leaders are knowledgeable of effective instructional strategies and promote the use of such strategies by communicating with and supervising educators. The purpose of this multiple case study was to provide a detailed description of instructional leadership for students with disabilities in an average school system in West Virginia. West Virginia was selected because none of the five principal preparation programs certified by the West Virginia Department of Education requires Special Education coursework. Middle schools were selected because they have some of the highest pupil to administrator ratios and the percentage of students with disabilities in grades six through eight who achieved proficient scores on the West Virginia achievement test (WESTEST2) are amongst the lowest of all grades in West Virginia. Results from interviews with three principals and two assistant principals representing three middle schools in the selected school system indicated that principals have a limited understanding of effective instructional leadership practices and a limited understanding of effective instructional strategies for students with disabilities. Implications for principal preparation programs, professional development, and future research are discussed. v Table of Contents Abstract Dedication Acknowledgements Table of Contents ii iii iv v List of Tables List of Figures

Accrediting bodies and research have noted the divide between coursework and experiences pre-service teachers (PSTs) have during field placements. To address this issue, three teacher educators have integrated McDonald et al.'s (2013) cycle of learning to embed their teacher preparation coursework in the areas of mathematics and special education into local elementary school classrooms. These instructional activities consisted of PSTs experiencing or learning about the activity in the college/university classroom, co-planning and rehearsing the activity at the college/university with the teacher educator, enacting the activity individually or in pairs with whole class or small groups of elementary students at the elementary school, and then debriefing as a group with the teacher educator and classroom teacher after working with the elementary students. The three courses summarized in this chapter, and the subsequent student reflections, validate the effectiveness of this practice and signal a need for broader adoption in other content areas across teacher preparation programs.