How Teachers Experience Principal Leadership: The Roles of Professional Community, Trust, Efficacy, and Shared Responsibility

Abstract

Purpose:The leadership of the principal is known to be a key factor in supporting student achievement, but how that leadership is experienced and instructionally enacted by teachers is much less clear. The purpose of this study was to examine various factors that are often present in principal-teacher interactions and teacher-teacher relationships to see how those may have an impact on teachers' classroom instructional practices. Data Collection and Analysis: Data for this quantitative study are from a teacher survey developed for the national research project, Learning from Leadership, funded by the Wallace Foundation. There are 4,165 completed surveys in the database, which reflects responses from teachers in grades K-12 in a sample of schools across the United States. Using a conceptual framework based on various known components of effective schools today, a stepwise linear regression examined the relationships among practices such as shared leadership and professional community with contextual variables such as trust and efficacy. Findings: Three types of instructional behaviors-Standard Contemporary Practice, Focused Instruction, and Flexible Grouping Practices-emerged as strong factors which operationally described effective teacher practice. The presence of shared leadership and professional community explain much of the strength among the three instructional variables. Furthermore, the effect of teachers' trust in the principal becomes less important when shared leadership and professional community are present. Self-efficacy strongly predicts Focused Instruction, but it has less predictive value for the other measures of instructional behavior. Individual teacher characteristics of gender and years of experience have clear impact on instructional practice, but there are no discernible patterns that suggest that the level of the principal (elementary vs. secondary) have more or less influence on teacher instructional behaviors. Conclusions: Increasing our knowledge about what leaders do and how they have an impact on the instructional behaviors of teachers will lead us to a better understand-ing of how leadership has a direct relationship to improved student achievement. These findings create a clearer picture of teacher-principal and teacher-teacher interactions that support learning and bring us closer to the elusive goal of clarifying the link between leadership and learning.

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“…This finding is consistent with previous research that showed that professional community is related to instructional improvement and is correlated with teachers' adoption of new practices (King & Newmann, 2001;Louis & Marks, 1998;Marks, Louis, & Printy, 2002;Smylie & Wenzel, 2003;Wahlstrom & Louis, 2008). Teachers are more likely to develop when they work with other teachers and not the principal (Zepeda & Ponticelli, 1998).…”

Toward Conceptual Clarity

“…In most studies, researchers used factor analyses to demonstrate that the different PLC dimensions could be distinguished as separate factors (e.g., Bryk, Camburn, & Louis, 1999;Hipp, 2005;Visscher & Witziers, 2004;Wahlstrom & Louis, 2008), while in other studies, researchers used a standardized index that represented the sum of separate factors to operationalize professional community (e.g., Louis et al, 1996;Louis & Marks, 1998;Marks & Louis, 1999). In only one study did researchers use second-order factor analyses to determine whether the separate dimensions measured a single underlying organizational construct, professional community (Bryk et al, 1999).…”

Catholic School Faculty Meetings: A Case Study Linking Catholic Identity, School Improvement, and Teacher Engagement

“…The representation of Catholic schools in research literature is important due to the unique perspective of teachers who share similar ideas about culture and engage in a strong sense of community with shared values and beliefs (Sergiovanni, 1996). School administrators will be more likely to positively impact instructional quality by developing communities of practice in which teachers share goals, work, and responsibility for student outcomes (Wahlstrom & Louis, 2008). This research provides school administrators as well as teachers the unique window to see, hear, and understand the viewpoint of the teachers in relation to their own experiences of faculty meetings.…”