Internships

School leaders have long identified the internship as the most important component of their training. Extensive clinical activities and field-based, mentored internships give aspiring leaders a realistic understanding of how to apply theory to practice and how to integrate the practical lessons of academic coursework and ground them in the day-to-day realities of schools. Meaningful internships require aspiring administrators to spend quality time with mentoring administrators in a variety of school or district settings and contexts solving real-life, complex problems of practice. The more time, involvement, practical, hands-on learning opportunities, the better. The experience of leadership is the goal.

Field-based experiences serve as the core of the educational leadership preparation experience. They help preservice administrators plan, perform, reflect, and form new and better leadership skill habits (e.g., conceptual, technical, and human skills needed to change schools and classrooms in ways that raise student achievement). While clinical experience is a well-established expectation in the preparation programs of such professions as medicine and law, the impetus for the development of internships in educational administration first emerged in 1947 at a meeting of the newly founded National Conference of Professors of Educational Administration (NCPEA). The 1950s witnessed continuing interest in the development of viable internship programs. Although program structures, hours, procedures, and expectations vary considerably from state to state, from institution to institution, the number of universities including internships as part of their programs climbed from 17 in 1950, to 117 in 1962, to over 220 in 1987.

Many institutions of higher learning have used the Interstate School Leaders Licensure Consortium's (ISLLC) Standards for School Leaders, developed by the Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO) in 1996, to revise preparation programs for prospective school leaders. The ISLLC Standards present a common core of knowledge, dispositions, and performances that help link leadership more directly to productive schools and enhanced educational outcomes. The standards confirm the centrality of the principal's role in ensuring student achievement through an unwavering emphasis on leadership for student learning. In 2002, the National Council for the Accreditation of Teacher Education (NCATE) aligned its accreditation standards for educational leadership training programs with the ISLLC Standards. This merger provided a unified set of standards, the Educational Leadership Constituent Council (ELCC) Standards, for review and accreditation of administrator preparation programs.

According to ELCC Standard 7.0, the internship provides significant opportunities for candidates to develop, synthesize, and apply the knowledge and skills identified in the six ELCC/ISLLC Standards through substantial, sustained, standards-based work in authentic settings, planned and guided cooperatively by the institution and school district personnel for graduate credit (see Table 1).

Application of standards-based knowledge, skills, and research in real settings over time is a critical aspect of any institutional program. Well-designed programs offer participants many possible alternative goals: (a) enable interns to develop administrative competence progressively through a range of practical experiences, (b) allow interns to apply theoretical knowledge and skills gained through universities in a practical setting, (c) enable interns to test their personal commitment to a career, (d) provide interns with an opportunity to gain insights into the preparation of a school, its goals, and how those goals may be achieved, [Page 522](e) give interns insight into their progress toward personal and professional goals, and (f) showcase the talents of interns as potential future school leaders.

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