In recent years, reflective, collaborative, inquiry-oriented approaches to supervision of teachers and teacher development have been discussed in the professional literature. However, few published studies have directly examined teachers’perspectives on principals’everyday instructional leadership characteristics and the impact of those characteristics on teachers. This article describes the everyday strategies of principals practicing exemplary instructional leadership and how these principals influenced teachers. The data were drawn from a qualitative study of more than 800 teachers in the southeastern, midwestern, and northwestern United States. An open-ended questionnaire was designed to provide teachers with the opportunity to identify and describe in detail the characteristics of principals that enhanced their classroom instruction and what impact those characteristics had on them. Inductive analyses of the data generated two major themes comprising 11 strategies, which were used to construct the Reflection-Growth (RG) model of instructional leadership. This article emphasizes those strategies and the meanings teachers identified with them.

This article, the first empirical study of its kind, presents findings from a larger qualitative study of teacher perspectives of principal mistreatment. A grounded theory method was used to study a sample of 50 U.S. teachers who believed they were subjected to long- term mistreatment from school principals. The authors briefly discuss descriptive, conceptual, and theoretical findings about principals' actions that teachers define as mistreatment. The harmful effects of such mistreatment on teachers psychologically/ emotionally and physically/physiologically as well as on classroom instruction and relationships with colleagues are more fully discussed. Implications of study findings are discussed for administrator and teacher preparation, professional educators, and further research.

The amount of qualitative research in which teachers subjectively describe the meaning of work stress is limited. This article presents data drawn from a qualitative study of teachers’ perceptions of work stress. Linkages between teacher stress and teacher performance are firmly established. The study data are discussed in terms of the Performance Adaptation Syndrome (PAS), a term developed from the data to describe the deleterious effects of prolonged work stress on the instructional ability of teachers.

This article presents a social-psychological model of teacher stress and burnout which emphasizes the importance of teacher performance variables and cycles of teacher-student interactions that develop over time. The theoretical statements that serve as the basis of the framework proposed in this report have been extracted and refinedfrom the Teacher Performance-Motivation Theory (TP-M Theory), a data-based, grounded theory developed directlyfrom a study of public school teachers.

No abstract