Introduction to Wallace Fellows

The Wisconsin Urban Schools Leadership Project, Wallace Fellows is a unique professional development opportunity for practicing urban school principals. The initiative focuses on broadening the use and undertanding of best practice strategies for school based administrators by creating cohorts of established school principals throughout the state of Wisconsin. I am a member of the first Madison based cohort which involves the Madison Metropolitan School District, University of Wisconsin-Madison and state of Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction.

The project is designed to foster individual growth, advance urban school leadership, and collaboratively develop a national model for assessment of master-level principals using a professional electronic portfolio as an evaluative instrument. Ultimately the goal of the project is to demonstrate how building-level leadership in urban school settings can significantly improve student academic performance.

The two year project will look at how to best present the information of the urban school master principal to the community at large and chronical the individual stories about how effective school based instructional leaders challenge themselves and their school communities to meet the highest level of achievement in public education.

The electronic portfolio you are about to view will focus on six key areas:

Professional Background

Race and Equity

Building the Community

Organizational Capacity

Leading and Managing

Academic Achievement/School Performance