Principals’ Instructional Leadership and Teacher Development: Teachers’ Perspectives

Abstract

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.

Teachers’ Perceptions of the Relationship between Principals’ Instructional Leadership, School Culture, and School Effectiveness in Pakistan

“…Müdür, okulun verimli olmasını sağlamak için farklı liderlik işlevleri uygular (Blasé ve Blasé, 1999, 2002Bodla ve Nawaz, 2010;Coleman, 2001;Goldring vd., 2008;Masuku, 2011). Herrera (2010) bu yaklaşıma "bana iyi bir okul gösterin, size iyi bir müdür göstereyim" (s. 5) sözleriyle katkıda bulunmuştur.…”

Principal theories of practice : mapping the cognitive structure and effects of instructional leadership

“…Principals have a positive impact on school culture by encouraging teacher empowerment through self-managed teacher leadership teams (Davis & Wilson, 2000;Short, 1994), encouraging teacher networking and building relationships of trust (Spillane & Thompson, 1997), engaging in specific instructional leadership practices that increase teacher motivation and self-efficacy (Basom & Frase, 2004;Blase & Blase, 1999), and sharing leadership and being open to reciprocal influences from effective teacher leaders (Anderson, 2004;Keedy & Simpson, 2001). Schools are essentially sets of interconnected relationships (Keedy & Achilles, 1997).…”

“…To the extent that these positive effects create a greater capacity for improved student achievement, Blase and Blase (1999) concluded that the Reflective Growth Model can be a useful way to understand how principals could indirectly have a positive influence on student outcomes.…”

“…Some researchers during this period began to conceptualize different forms of leadership to describe the kinds of phenomenon Blase and Blase (1999) and others were describing. One such concept was transformational leadership.…”

“…Keedy and Simpson (2001) argued that norms of behavior indicate a school's capacity for reform better than simple structural changes or enhancements, and that as norms of behavior moved toward relationships of trust, openness and collaboration, capacity for real reform increased. Whereas Spillane and Thompson (1997), Blase and Blase (1999), and Davis and Wilson (2000) focused on principal-teacher relationships by looking at specific influences of principals on the affective dimension of teachers' work lives, Keedy and Simpson (2001) explored ways in which principals and teachers exerted reciprocal influences in terms of the more general school-wide norms of behavior.…”