Assistant Principals: The Case for Shared Instructional Leadership

Abstract

<jats:p> In today's restructuring secondary schools, principals have new instructional leadership responsibilities on top of already demanding management responsibilities. Not enough time exists for one person to address all these expectations successfully. Assistant principals can effectively share instructional leadership roles to increase a school's success as a learning organization for students and educators. </jats:p>

Examining the mediating effect of job satisfaction on the relation between responsibilities and career aspiration of vice-principals

“…The opportunities to play a central role in school management through active participation in its strategic decision making processes instead of passive execution of delegated tasks can be a good source of job satisfaction to vice-principals. The result echoes the assertion of Kaplan and Owings (1999) that shared leadership could increase vice-principals' job satisfaction.…”

“…The results essentially supported the design of the study for using sequential regression to factor out the effect of the first block of demographic and school factors as the first block was proven to be a predictor for both job satisfaction (R 2 = .064, F = 2.954, p = .005) and career aspiration (R 2 = .107, F = 3.115, p = .001) as reported in the model statistics for regressions (1) and (2) in Table 4. The results of regression (1) confirmed the assertion of Kaplan and Owings (1999) that the expanded portfolio undertaken by vice-principals had a positive effect on their job satisfaction.…”

“…They reported that vice-principals feel that they had insufficient training or experience to effectively carry out the extended list of tasks. On the contrary, however, Kaplan and Owings (1999) argued that the increased reform-driven expectations of shared leadership actually increased the job satisfaction of vice-principals and provided them with additional opportunities for professional enrichment. In a study of 245 secondary vice-principals in Mississippi, Chen, Blendinger, and McGrath (2000) reported that vice-principals liked working with students, teachers and parents but least preferred dealing with incompetent teachers.…”

Exploring distributed instructional leadership : case studies of assistant principals in an urban school district.

“…This perspective reflects the role that assistant principals have traditionally held as disciplinarians and policy managers (Glanz, 1994;Marshall, 1991;Marshall & Hooley, 2006;Scoggins & Bishop, 1993) and can impede the instructional leadership process. With distributed leadership on the horizon as a vehicle for the implementation of instructional leadership it is necessary to examine the assistant principal's role (Celikten, 2001;Cranston, Tromans, & Reugebrink, 2004;Hausman, Nebeker, McCreary, & Donaldson, 2002;Kaplan & Owings, 1999;Kwan & Walker, 2012;Oleszewski, Shoho, & Barnett;Williams, 1995). The wide range of responsibilities held and the pressing nature of these responsibilities is clearly an impediment to assistant principals as instructional leaders (Cranston et al, 2004;Hausman et al, 2002;Kwan & Walker, 2012;Oleszewski et al, 2012).…”

“…There were a few things they had in common -teacher evaluation, supervision of a content area Professional Learning Community, committee membership, monitoring the completion of district/state mandates -but for the most part, their list of responsibilities was as diverse as those traditionally presented when assistant principals are discussed (Celikten, 2001;Cranston et al, 2004;Hausman et al, 2002;Kaplan & Owings, 1999;Kwan & Walker, 2012;Oleszewski et al, 2012;Williams, 1995). Another thing they had in common was their lack of responsibility for student discipline/student issues.…”