LibGuides: EDU 512: Distinguished Practitioners Series for Educational Leadership and Societal Change: Overview

Distinguished Practitioners Series

The graduate-level educational leadership course EDU 512 is structured differently from the other courses in the program. Instead of having one professor for the whole course, the students will have 5 different teachers, all of whom are educational practitioners of one kind or another.

To the right are links to other LibGuides maintained by Ikeda Library that will help you complete the course assignments for EDU 512. Below it are links to other websites with resources for writing interpretive papers.

For each guest speaker, you will find a link to his or her biographical information and links to course readings, when available, either from materials held by the library or that are available online.

Resources for Writing Interpretive Essays

Below are links to other websites that describe how to write interpretive papers. As with any resource, you will need to determine what your own writing needs are (and your professor's requirements, of course) before deciding which resource, or which elements of a resource, will be most helpful. Since Interpretive essays are commonly used in the humanities, two of the resources focus on writing about literature and history.

Critical or Interpretive Analysis Using Close Reading
Interpretive Thesis
Both this link and the one above lead to pages in the online textbook written by Richard Jewell. The one above looks at the meaning and organization of these types of papers, and this one focuses on developing the paper's thesis. The paper topic for EDU 512 is given to you, but the process the author describes would be helpful toward developing it in your own way.
Analytical and Interpretive Essays for History Courses
This guide from the Writing Center at the University of Montana gives a short but thorough overview of an analytical and interpretive essay, and the steps for how to write one. While it was intended for students writing in the field of history, the information is pertinent to most disciplines, including education.
Writing an Essay
This page by the Queensland University of Technology describes what to write for more application-oriented interpretive essays. This approach is probably the most common for day-to-day writing in educational administration.

Online Resources @ Ikeda Library

Reflective Writing Resources
This page has links to many websites and external resources that talk about reflective writing for educational leaders. The third link down on reflective essays might be especially helpful for completing the weekly reflection papers for EDU 512.
Resources for Writing Papers
While the EDU 512 assignment is an interpretive paper, the resources on analytic papers on the right side of this page might also prove useful since there are many similarities between the two types of papers.