Assistant Professor of Education at Centenary College of Louisiana
About
Michael's career as an educator began as a substitute teacher in Caddo Parish, Louisiana. In 2007, after years of serving as a community mental health specialist, Michael transitioned to school counseling and in 2011, he was selected "Middle School Counselor of the Year" by his counselor peers in the Caddo Parish School System. Michael's higher education experience includes serving one year as an assistant professor of education at Jarvis Christian College in Hawkins, Texas where he also served as the coordinator for Male Student Initiatives and as the director of teacher assessment and certification. From fall 2014 until the spring of 2018, he served in several academic and administrative roles at Southern University at Shreveport, Louisiana, including director of community partnerships and interim department chair of Education. In the summer of 2018, Michael accepted a tenure-track faculty appointment and began teaching in the master of arts in teaching program at Centenary College of Louisiana. In September of 2018, he was awarded the Mattie Allen Broyles Inaugural Year Research Eminent Scholars Endowed Chair. He has been a top-ten rated presenter at the National Charter Schools Conference and has convened local institutes concerning the school to prison pipeline that exists for far too many boys of color in Louisiana.
Current Work:
Michael studies, trains, and teaches urban principals and teacher-leaders. These uniquely placed leaders have a heightened responsibility to serve in that their student populations deserve and demand the most thoughtful and transformational leaders. Upon learning of the Social Action, Leadership, and Transformation Model, he is planning to be among the first wave of researchers to apply this framework in investigations of the urban principalship. He is also planning to be among those scholars to first utilize the psychometric scale under development to examine which instructional leadership practices correlate with social justice leadership efforts in urban schools.
Research Area Keyword(s):
Urban schools, principalship, leadership practices