Master of Education (MEd) + Principal Licensure

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About the Master of Education (MEd) + Principal Licensure

The MEd coupled with Principal Licensure is intended to provide educators without graduate degrees the opportunity to earn a degree that recognizes learning beyond their initial Bachelor’s. A Master’s degree is required by several states for those holding Principal licenses.

The UO has offered programs to prepare school and district leaders (e.g., principals and superintendents) for licensure for decades, with the programs changing over time to meet new requirements set by the state. The most recent change, adopted by Oregon’s Teacher Standards and Practices Commission (TSPC) for implementation in August of 2022, required a substantial redesign of programs preparing school and district administrators. New expectations set by the state include more credits in principal preparation programs, substantial redesign of the clinical internship experiences, and a much greater emphasis on understanding and implementing initiatives to address historical inequities with our educational systems.

This program is the result of a new partnership between the University of Oregon and the Coalition of Oregon School of Administrators (COSA) to meet TSPC’s recently updated administrator standards and licensing requirements.

What can I do with this degree + licensure?

The UO Principal Licensure program’s curriculum content, sequence, and proficiency requirements are tailored to develop advanced leadership capabilities that enable individuals to lead schools in making decisions and implementing programs grounded in evidence-based practices. The program’s mission is to develop education leaders who are equipped to apply data-driven evidence to promote equitable outcomes and address opportunity gaps for students, schools, and education systems by working to:

Raise the most pressing problems of practice in the service of ensuring equitable outcomes and eliminating disparities for students.
Identify, analyze, and synthesize relevant sources of evidence in making decisions that serve the best interests of students, communities, and their schools.
Communicate and integrate the best available research evidence with knowledge and expertise of professional educators in the field aligned with specific community needs and assets.
Take targeted, evidence-based actions that change systems to better meet the needs of all students.

Students in our programs will learn both content and analytical skills. Our programs endorse a systems-level organizational theory of education and focus on implementation of research and evaluation methods to both understand and affect that system.

The Principal Licensure program is designed to address the growing need of education professionals to acquire the knowledge and skills necessary to lead school systems in today’s data-driven, change-oriented environment, with a particular focus on leading for equity. This program follows current recommendations from the University Council for Educational Administration, the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, and the Education Schools Project to craft licensure programs designed for working professionals who can initiate reforms in current educational settings. Our Principal Licensure program anchors its content to case-based problems in the field.

The use of Zoom for synchronous sessions and Panopto recordings shared via Canvas for our asynchronous sessions enables students from across the state to participate in our programs while continuing their full-time employment in the schools.

Program Requirements