Within-Principal Variation: Exploring the Relationships Between Time Use and School Context

Abstract

1983), school size (Hallinger & Murphy, 1985), and student body composition (Andrews, Soder & Jacoby, 1987) have influenced the nature of school leadership and have made research findings difficult to generalize (Leithwood et al., 2010).Despite theoretical claims of the importance of situational leadership, little empirical evidence has been published investigating the relationship between principal time use and school context. In studies exploring this relationship, researchers limited the sample of principals to a single school district in an attempt to provide evidence for a potential causal relationship. Instead of finding evidence that principal time led to changes in academic achievement, May et al. (2012) argued that the more plausible conclusion was that school context drove principals' activities and interactions. However, homogenous samples and abbreviated observational periods limited previous studies' ability to explore variance in principal time use.Although almost half of all United States school districts are located in rural communities (Aritomi, Coopersmith, & Gruber, 2009), principal time use researchers have overwhelmingly sampled principals from urban districts (May, Huff, & Goldring, 2012). Since 2000, 82% of published principal time use studies investigated the behaviors of urban principals (author, 2016). Furthermore, 29% of these studies sampled principals in large districts with over 100,000 students, including Chicago Public Schools (Spillane & Zuberi, 2009), Miami-Dade County Public Schools (Horng, Klasik, & Loeb, 2010) and Jefferson County Public Schools (Shellinger, 2006). Although there are more school districts in the United States with fewer than 100 students than districts with more than 100,000 students (author, 2015), researchers have neglected to investigate principal time use outside of large, urban districts.By enrolling a diverse sample of principals, the current study aimed to investigate whether school context predicted variation in principals' time. Taking into consideration schoollevel contextual factors, the study examined how allocation of time in leadership activities varied over the course of a principal's typical day and week. The purpose of this study was to investigate how principals allocated their time and to analyze the relationships between principal time use and school context, including prior academic outcomes, school level, locale, and student demographics. To achieve this purpose, I asked two research questions:1. How does a principal's allocation of time vary during the day and over a week? 2. How does school context predict variation within principals' allocation of time during the day and over a week?