Participation

Your Role in the Process

Preparation programs and pathways are designed to prepare candidates for school leadership positions. Given that programs are designed to develop candidates' leadership knowledge and skills, as defined by the Massachusetts standards, candidates should have sufficient opportunity, through coursework or field work, to develop their capacity for setting direction, creating a powerful learning culture, developing techniques to support teachers, and building an engaged community. The PAL assessment tasks are designed to be completed throughout candidate preparation and can be aligned with coursework, field work and other assessments.

Support the Preparation Programs and Pathways

To support the development and implementation of PAL, the PAL Development Team will provide regular communication with faculty and instructors on how they might align the assessments with the pathway requirements in order to provide support and feedback. Training documents will also be designed to provide preparation pathway faculty with guidelines for how to support candidates in completing the assessment tasks. Orientation materials will include webinars, written documents and guides, and conferences as well as all materials required to implement the assessments.

PAL tasks are independent of, but complementary to, the work products that preparation programs and pathways require for successful completion in their school leadership programs. As preparation programs and pathways begin to embed similar assessment task work into their programs, we will conduct interviews and surveys to understand what formative steps programs are taking to support PAL. This information will be shared with all faculty and instructors as a way to share best practices.

Confidentiality

The PAL tasks are designed solely for the purpose of determining whether a leadership candidate is 'well-prepared' to take on his or her initial role as a school leader. Access to the performance outcomes will be provisioned to maintain confidentiality. All candidate identity information will be maintained confidentially and only aggregate information on task completion and scores will be computed and shared.