Developing Effective Principals: What Kind of Learning Matters?

Effective principals can generate better outcomes for the teachers, students and the schools they lead. But great principals don't grow on trees; they receive high-quality development and ongoing support.In this report, researchers synthesize two decades of research on principal pre-service preparation and professional development and describe results of their own additional studies. They find that high-quality learning programs for future and current principals are associated with improved outcomes such as princip?als' feelings of preparedness, teacher satisfaction and retention, and student achievement.  Evidence also suggests that a focus on equity-oriented leadership has the potential to improve principals' ability to meet the needs of diverse learners.The research was led by Linda Darling-Hammond, who was also lead author of an influential report?, released 15 years ago, describing the key characteristics of effective principal preparation and professional development.  The report finds that high-quality pre-service preparation programs have common elements:Rigorous recruitment of candidates into the program;Close school district-university partnerships;Groupings of enrollees into cohorts;Experiences where candidates apply what they learn, guided by experienced mentors or coaches; andA focus on important content, with the five most important areas being leading instruction, managing change, developing people, shaping a positive school culture and meeting the needs of diverse learners.Mentoring and coaching were influential and valuable for current principals, along with collegial learning networks and applied learning, the report finds.Researchers found via a national survey that principals' access to high-quality learning opportunities appears to have improved over the last decade, with more than two-thirds of principals today reporting having had at least minimal access to learning across the five key content areas. At the same time, there are clearly gaps. One example: "Few principals have access to authentic, job-based learning opportunities during preparation, and high-quality internships are still relatively rare," the report says. In addition, access to learning opportunities varies greatly across states and by school poverty level, an indicator that also tends to reflect the racial demographics of a school. Principals in high-poverty schools were much less likely to report that they had professional development on important topics including redesigning schools for deeper learning and designing professional learning opportunities for teachers and other staff, for example. And only 10 percent of principals in high-poverty schools reported having had a mentor or coach in the last two years versus 24 percent in low-poverty schools.Across the country, most principals reported wanting more professional development in nearly all topics, but faced obstacles in pursuing learning opportunities, including lack of time and insufficient money.The authors emphasize that state policies can make a difference in the availability and quality of leadership preparation programs. In states and districts that overhauled standards and used them to inform principal preparation, learning opportunities, and assessment, there is evidence that the quality of principal learning has improved.To foster high-quality principal learning, the authors suggest that policymakers can:Develop and better use state principal licensing and program approval standards;Fund statewide efforts, such as leadership academies, paid internships and mentor training; andEncourage greater attention to equity by, for example, allocating professional development resources to schools that need them most or funding high-quality preparation for prospective principals of high-poverty schools.The report is the third of three research syntheses commissioned by Wallace. The first, released in February 2021, examined the critical role of principals in student learning and other outcomes. The second examined the increasingly important role of assistant principals and was released in April 2021.

Clinical and Economic Outcomes Associated With the Timing of Initiation of Basal Insulin in Patients With Type 2 Diabetes Mellitus Previously Treated With Oral Antidiabetes Drugs

AbstractPurposeIn patients with type 2 diabetes mellitus (T2DM) not achieving glycemic targets using oral antidiabetes drugs (OADs), studies suggest that timely insulin initiation has clinical benefits. Insulin initiation at the early versus late stage of disease progression has not been explored in detail. This retrospective database analysis investigated clinical and economic outcomes associated with the timing of insulin initiation in patients with T2DM treated with ≥1 OAD in a real-world US setting.MethodsThis study linked data from the Truven Health MarketScan® Commercial database, Medicare Supplemental database, and Quintiles Electronic Medical Records database. A total of 1830 patients with T2DM were included. Patients were grouped according to their OAD use before basal insulin initiation (1, 2, or ≥3 OADs) as a proxy for the timing of insulin initiation. Clinical and economic outcomes were evaluated over 1 year of follow-up.FindingsDuring follow-up the 1 OAD group, compared with the 2 and ≥3 OADs groups, had a greater reduction in glycosylated hemoglobin A1c (−1.7% vs −1.0% vs −0.9%, respectively; P < 0.0001), greater achievement of glycemic target (38.2% vs 26.7% vs 19.6%, respectively; P < 0.0001), and a lower incidence of hypoglycemia (2.7% vs 6.6% vs 5.0%, respectively; P = 0.0002), with no difference in total health care costs ($21,167 vs$21,060 vs $20,133, respectively).ImplicationsThis study shows that early insulin initiation (represented by the 1 OAD group) may be clinically beneficial to patients with T2DM not controlled with OADs, without adding to costs. This supports the call for timely initiation of individualized insulin therapy in this population

Methodological problems in dementia research in primary care: a case study of a randomized controlled trial

The emerging UK national research network in neurodegenerative diseases and dementias aims to promote large-scale community-based studies of therapeutic interventions, based in primary care. However, trials in primary care settings can be problematic, a common difficulty being the recruitment of a large enough sample. The article discusses recruitment issues in a multi-centre randomized controlled trial of differing educational approaches to improving dementia care in general practice. Sample size calculations based on community studies of prevalence may be misleading in intervention trials which may recruit practices with atypical demography. Recruitment rates for practitioners in this study were lower than expected. Professionals excluded themselves from the study mainly due to pressures of time and staff shortages, and we detected both ambivalent attitudes to primary care research and a perception that research into dementia care was not a high priority. Evaluation of the quality of care may be perceived as criticism of clinical practice, at a time when general practice is undergoing major administrative and contractual changes. Variations in Research Ethics Committee conditions for approval led to different methods of recruitment of patients and carers into the study, a factor which may have contributed to disparate levels of recruitment across study sites. Patient and carer levels of recruitment were lower than expected and were affected partly by carers' time pressures and other family commitments, but largely by problems in identifying patients and carers in the practices. The development of research potential in primary care is at an early stage and studies reliant on patient recruitment in general practice must allow for multiple obstacles to enrollment. This is particularly relevant for studies of dementia care, where the prevalence of dementia in a demographically average population is low and the incidence very low, compared with other disabilities. Professionals may give dementia low priority in allocating practice time for research projects, and strategies to address this problem are needed

Aquilegia, Vol. 37 No. 3, Summer 2013, Newsletter of the Colorado Native Plant Society

https://epublications.regis.edu/aquilegia/1143/thumbnail.jp

Evaluation of a hierarchical reinforcement learning spoken dialogue system

We describe an evaluation of spoken dialogue strategies designed using hierarchical reinforcement learning agents. The dialogue strategies were learnt in a simulated environment and tested in a laboratory setting with 32 users. These dialogues were used to evaluate three types of machine dialogue behaviour: hand-coded, fully-learnt and semi-learnt. These experiments also served to evaluate the realism of simulated dialogues using two proposed metrics contrasted with ‘Precision-Recall’. The learnt dialogue behaviours used the Semi-Markov Decision Process (SMDP) model, and we report the first evaluation of this model in a realistic conversational environment. Experimental results in the travel planning domain provide evidence to support the following claims: (a) hierarchical semi-learnt dialogue agents are a better alternative (with higher overall performance) than deterministic or fully-learnt behaviour; (b) spoken dialogue strategies learnt with highly coherent user behaviour and conservative recognition error rates (keyword error rate of 20%) can outperform a reasonable hand-coded strategy; and (c) hierarchical reinforcement learning dialogue agents are feasible and promising for the (semi) automatic design of optimized dialogue behaviours in larger-scale systems

NIRCam coronagraphic Lyot stop: design, fabrication, and testing

The NIRCam instrument on the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) will provide a coronagraphic imaging capability to search for extrasolar planets in the 2 - 5 microns wavelength range. This capability is realized by a set of Lyot pupil stops with patterns matching the occulting mask located in the JWST intermediate focal plane in the NIRCam optical system. The complex patterns with transparent apertures are made by photolithographic process using a metal coating in the opaque region. The optical density needs to be high for the opaque region, and transmission needs to be high at the aperture. In addition, the Lyot stop needs to operate under cryogenic conditions. We will report on the Lyot stop design, fabrication and testing in this paper

Structure of a Membrane-Embedded Prenyltransferase Homologous to UBIAD1

Membrane-embedded prenyltransferases from the UbiA family catalyze the Mg2+-dependent transfer of a hydrophobic polyprenyl chain onto a variety of acceptor molecules and are involved in the synthesis of molecules that mediate electron transport, including Vitamin K and Coenzyme Q. In humans, missense mutations to the protein UbiA prenyltransferase domain-containing 1 (UBIAD1) are responsible for Schnyder crystalline corneal dystrophy, which is a genetic disease that causes blindness. Mechanistic understanding of this family of enzymes has been hampered by a lack of three-dimensional structures. We have solved structures of a UBIAD1 homolog from Archaeoglobus fulgidus, AfUbiA, in an unliganded form and bound to Mg2+ and two different isoprenyl diphosphates. Functional assays on MenA, a UbiA family member from E. coli, verified the importance of residues involved in Mg2+ and substrate binding. The structural and functional studies led us to propose a mechanism for the prenyl transfer reaction. Disease-causing mutations in UBIAD1 are clustered around the active site in AfUbiA, suggesting the mechanism of catalysis is conserved between the two homologs

Environmental and Resource Economics: Some Recent Developments by

A first draft of this paper was prepared when the authors were visiting the Abdus Salam International Centre for Theoretical Physics (ICTP), Trieste, during April-May 2004. The current version was completed in Colombo, Sri Lanka, in June 2004, while the authors were attending the bi-annual teaching and research workshop of the South Asian Network for Development and Environmental Economics (SANDEE). We are most grateful to K. Sreenivasan (Director of ICTP), and Manik Duggar and Priya Shyamsundar (respectively, Programme Manager and Director of SANDEE), for making our visits both possible and most agreeable. Over the years, we have benefited greatly from discussions with Scott Barrett, William Brock, Stev