School Leaders Building Capacity From Within: Resolving Competing Agendas Creatively

Leonard C. Burrello is Professor of Education and Chair of Educational Leadership Program and Executive Director of The Forum on Education at Indiana University. He is currently studying school improvement in rural schools within a distributive leadership framework and consulting with the Gates Initiative on Small Schools for the University of Indianapolis in the Indianapolis Public Schools.

With co-author Lauren Hoffman he completed at three organizational consultation project in Washtenaw County, Michigan where they helped create a new planning framework using the work of Robert Fritz. They are also working with the Illinois Cooperative Leadership project in Illinois to help build more learner-centered schools.

With Lynn Murray, his collaboration began in 1993 in a study of her leadership in a suburban district in Vermont and she has consulted with both authors helping to build a new organizational structure and planning process in a large urban Midwestern school district. He teaches courses on moral and distributive leadership, and organizational change at Indiana University.

Lauren P. Hoffman is Assistant Professor of Education at Lewis University. After a 27 year career as a practicing speech and language specialist, supervisor, professional development specialist, and assistant director of special education in two large suburban Chicago cooperatives, Dr. Hoffman joined the faculty at Lewis University and also serves as an Visiting Professor at Indiana University. She co-developed and co-directs the TECnet project that focuses school teams building unified systems to support all students.

In addition she consults with school districts and school teams on issues related to curriculum, instruction, and assessment and has recently completed a new manual on Linking IEPs to State Learning Standards (2002). She has applied her Fritz training in Michigan, Illinois, and Indiana school districts over the past four years. She has published an article with Professor Burrello for the Education Administrative Quarterly on Foster’s (1989) critical leadership theory based upon her work in Michigan. She is currently helping to develop Lewis’s new doctoral studies in leadership and is teaching courses on development and learning, instructional strategies, and performance-based assessment.

Lynn E. Murray is the Principal Investigator on an Instructional Leadership and Comprehensive School Reform project and the former Co-director of the Vermont Teacher Quality Project both housed at the Vermont Institutes in Montpelier, Vermont. She recently collaborated with her colleagues in the Teacher Quality Project in the publication of the Vermont Field Guide to Educator Mentoring.

For the past 30 years, she has served as principal of both a large suburban K-8 elementary and middle school and a smaller rural elementary school, served as a director of special education, and Vermont state department consultant and grant writer, Professor of Education and Chair of Teacher Education at Trinity College, Burlington, Vermont. She co-developed and co-directed the first Northeast Regional Resource Center that served New England, New York and the Puerto Rico, and was a member of the research and development staff of the Northeast Regional Lab. She has studied intensively with Robert Fritz for the past three years, and is an experienced trainer for his organization.