Principal professional learning is shifting in many districts in the United States of America away from didactic, central office-managed workshops to include more peer-led learning opportunities. Yet researchers have largely failed to examine issues of positionality and authority in principal professional learning, despite international scholarship that demonstrates the influence of micropolitics on the enactment of change. Using event analysis of a critical case study in an urban district in the northeast USA, we examine three chains of events. Principals and central office administrators used a variety of tactics – cooperation, compromise, and co-optation – to navigate overt and covert conflict during implementation of peer-led principal professional learning. Principals and central office administrators encountered micropolitics as they determined authority over the learning agenda, negotiated a redefinition of a new principal role, and co-constructed official spaces for peer-led learning. Findings provide lessons for educational leaders and those responsible for professional learning in districts with middle manager roles in any context, as well as suggesting that future research on the micropolitics of principal professional learning is warranted.

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Arguments for pay-for-performance or incentive programs assert that compensating teachers based on student outcomes raises school performance and attracts better quality teachers (Lazear, 2003). However, the evidence on these initiatives is mixed (Chiang et al., 2017;Dee & Wyckoff, 2015;Fryer, 2013). Some explain the inconsistent findings by suggesting that teachers value intrinsic aspects of their work and may not be motivated by extrinsic factors (Johnson & Papay, 2009;Johnson, 1984). Yet, few studies focus on what happens when teachers are incentivized to collaborate, an activity that may be intrinsically valuable to them but difficult to schedule.In this correlational study, we examine a program in Green Public Schools (GPS) that compensated teachers taking up expanded roles featuring collaboration with colleagues. We ask whether teachers continued to collaborate after stipends for the expanded role ended in 2017. We find that many teachers in the Professional Performance Program (PPP) continued collaborating in their own school while some continued collaborating across schools and that this varied by role type and duration of the role. BackgroundScholars have studied the relationship between pay-for-performance and student achievement, teacher retention, and teacher attendance (