In 2021, the UNC School of Education launched its Master of School Administration program with in-person and virtual class options, enabling aspiring school leaders from any North Carolina district to access classes and expert faculty members in Chapel Hill. Martinette Horner, Ed.D., MSA program director, reflects on the shift to HyFlex learning.
Our Master of School Administration (MSA) program at the UNC School of Education has a long history of preparing working educators for school-based leadership roles. Each year, we graduate leaders who most often become assistant principals and then eventually lead their own dynamic school leadership teams.
We know principals influence conditions that affect school environments and either enable or constrain school success and growth.
Our graduates enter schools with knowledge, skills, and dispositions that help to create conditions that result in positive student outcomes — learning outcomes and, in some ways more importantly, “whole child” outcomes. We know children don’t come into schools as blank slates. They arrive with intervening variables, and this means our future principals must understand those variables and systems that prevent children from being their best self and student.
Our MSA students develop an equity mindset for their leadership practices. We help them to recognize inequity and systems that disproportionately affect marginalized communities in their school community. Chris Scott, Ph.D. — director of UNC LEADS, which brings North Carolina Principal Fellows from across much of the eastern part of the state — regularly reminds our students, “You can’t do anything about the things you don’t see.” Once they see these problems of practice, we prepare them to act upon them, to remedy systems that lead to inequity.
That’s one signature of our MSA program: To prepare folks who make sure that all children receive what they need in their school.
Another signature of our program is a commitment to continuous improvement. We provide students with knowledge and skills to lead an organization with a growth mindset — an organization that continually assesses its work, sets goals, and creates and executes a plan to realizing those goals.
A strength of our MSA program is the cohort model. Students create strong professional relationships from the very beginning of the program. Program faculty carefully craft experiences that strengthen student ties that extend beyond their time as students. We often hear from alumni that they create communication groups to stay in touch and they constantly lean on one another for support.
I always tell our students, “You will learn just as much from your classmates as you will from your instructors.” So, it’s important to us to bring in a cohort of educators with diverse experiences and backgrounds.
In the past few years, since launching the MSA program in a HyFlex — or hybrid, flexible — modality, our cohorts have become even more diverse. Our students can attend classes face to face or virtually, and our classrooms enable them to join multiple, concurrent breakout sessions, pairing in-person and virtual combinations of students.
Coupled with UNC LEADS, implementing HyFlex has enriched our classrooms and broadened our students’ experiences, perspectives, and professional networks.
When I joined the School’s MSA program in 2016, we had some of that diversity. We had gender diversity and growing racial and ethnic diversity. But we didn’t have geographic diversity.
Most students could drive to campus for in-person classes. We prepared future school leaders who were working full-time as teachers and school counselors in Wake, Durham, Orange, and Alamance counties. Sometimes we had students from a county to the north, such as Person, or to the south, such as Chatham. Having that tight geographic radius often means students bring similar experiences into our classrooms and come from similar backgrounds.
MSA students from the Triangle — where our cities and towns are home to universities, research, and tech companies — often work in relatively well-funded schools. The further away from the Triangle we go, into remote areas of the state, resources differ greatly. Our educators from the Research Triangle regions naturally bring similar experiences and contexts to the classroom.
HyFlex helps us to achieve geographic diversity. Because of UNC LEADS, we have welcomed future school leaders from Bertie, New Hanover, Wake, and Wayne counties and charter schools. We hope to welcome aspiring principals from additional districts through this program.
So far, our students from across North Carolina have had a positive response to HyFlex cohorts. In a survey of our HyFlex students, all of them agreed or strongly agreed they “feel like a member of a community” in the MSA program and that they “believe [their] classmates know [them] as an individual.”
As the flagship university, we have a duty to go beyond the geographic boundaries of the Research Triangle – in service to all of North Carolina’s school districts. HyFlex helps us to do that and to provide access to our high-quality program to folks who are literally hours away.
HyFlex has already helped to enrich our MSA classrooms. I am confident it has already provided future principals with a wider lens for looking at education and the communities they serve. My goal is to utilize the HyFlex modality to help us prepare school leaders for every North Carolina district.