Leonard O. Pellicer is Dean of the School of Education and Organizational Leadership at the University of La Verne and Distinguished Professor Emeritus from the University of South Carolina. He has served in a number of teaching and leadership roles over the past thirty-five years. He served as the first director of the South Carolina Educational Policy Center, at the University of South Carolina, and was also the director of the African American Professors Program, a program designed to address the problem of a shortage of African American professors at predominantly white higher-education institutions. His experiences prior to joining the faculty at the University of South Carolina include service as a high school and middle school teacher, high school assistant principal, high school principal, and director of a teacher education center that provided staff development opportunities for teachers and administrators in five Florida school districts. In 1986 to 1987, he was a Fullbright Scholar in Southeast Asia. During this period, he taught graduate classes at the University of the Philippines and used his expertise in school leadership to assist in developing programs to train school leaders in the region. From 1992 to 195, he spent a good deal of time in the Republic of South Africa as a member of a team that developed a field-based training program for black principals in the "new South Africa." He holds a bachelor's degree in English education and master's and doctoral degrees in educational administration from the University of Florida in Gainesville. For more than twenty-five years, he has written, consulted, and spoken extensively in the areas of school leadership, instructional leadership, and educational programs for disadvantaged students. He has coauthored two other books with Lorin Anderson for Corwin Press, including A Handbook for Teacher Leaders (1995 and Teacher Peer Assistance and Review: A Practical Guide for Teachers and Administrators (2001).
