In Your Transition, Leadership Experience Counts Mostly in the Classroom

As a newly hired tenure-track assistant professor in educational leadership fresh on the heels of 32 years in the principalship and other administrative roles, I wasn’t fully ready for the new work world I’d entered.

The most daunting aspect of my encore career involved research and publishing, two requirements that rarely confront those who spend their lives in district/school administration. The expectation to publish scholarly work was communicated by the hiring committee and the education school dean during the interview process.

I learned that the previous hires in my department of educational leadership who had come from superintendencies worked at the university for only two to three years because they did not meet publishing requirements. As with many K-12 education leaders, my only experience in academic writing was completing my doctoral dissertation years earlier.

Now I was expected to ramp up to publish at least one article a year in a refereed journal (meaning articles published in practitioner-friendly magazines such as School Administrator would not count).