Exploring Principal Development and Teacher Outcomes

How Principals Can Strengthen Instruction, Teacher Retention, and Student Achievement

Peter Youngs, Jihyun Kim, Madeline Mavrogordato, Peter Youngs, Jihyun Kim, Madeline Mavrogordato

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780367374402
• eBook ISBN: 9781000292572
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

This edited volume examines innovative ways of preparing, supervising, and evaluating principals and explores factors that promote effective leadership practices. Chapter authors consider how principals' leadership practices affect teachers' instruction, satisfaction, commitment, retention, and effectiveness, and present evidence that principals can influence key student outcomes as well. Covering topics such as school leaders' use of time, their efforts to reduce implicit bias, how leadership practices are associated with teachers' workplace attitudes, leadership and student achievement, and how school leaders can best be supported under new federal legislation, this volume is a "must read" for educational leadership and policy faculty, school and district administrators, and researchers committed to promoting effective principal leadership.

1

Introduction

Peter Youngs, Jihyun Kim and Madeline Mavrogordato

Over the past decade, an important catalyst in attempts to improve schooling has often been overlooked: effective principal leadership. As David Leonhardt (2017) pointed out in a New York Times column, principals deserve more attention from policy makers and researchers for several reasons. They have full responsibility for their schools and work closely with teachers and students every day. They make decisions about issues ranging from those at an individual student level to the whole organization level, and their leadership can make a meaningful difference in teachers’ and students’ lives. In addition, the role of principals is growing more prominent under the 2015 Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), the most recent reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act. ESSA provides principals more flexibility in terms of how to promote high-quality teaching, student learning, and school improvement.

The conceptual framework underlying this book contends that effective principals (a) provide strong instructional support, (b) maintain a consistent focus on student learning, (c) promote teacher collaboration, and (d) foster productive school environments (Newmann et al., 2001; Robinson et al., 2008). The framework also suggests that principal preparation, professional development, supervision, and evaluation can promote effective leadership and that such leadership is often associated with greater levels of instructional quality, teacher retention, and student achievement. Along with the 2015 reauthorization of ESEA, recent reforms in principal preparation, professional development, supervision, and evaluation make this a propitious time to study the antecedents and consequences of effective school leadership.

The goal of this volume is to (a) examine innovative ways of preparing, supervising, and evaluating principals; (b) describe school leaders’ time use, efforts to reduce implicit bias, and roles in research-practice partnerships; and (c) consider how principals’ leadership practices are associated with teachers’ workplace attitudes, instruction, and retention; and student achievement. This book argues that principal preparation and development programs, and district principal supervision and evaluation practices can all foster strong leadership practices but only if these approaches are carefully designed and implemented and the data that they generate are interpreted and used appropriately. The book presents evidence that principals can strongly affect several aspects of teachers’ work lives including their instruction, satisfaction, commitment, retention, and effectiveness. It also includes a chapter on how ESSA is likely to shape principal leadership practices and how school leaders can best be supported under the new federal legislation.

The book is broadly organized into four parts. The first part, Chapters 2 through 5, examines innovative practices in principal preparation, professional development, supervision, and evaluation. The second part, Chapters 6 through 8, describes principals’ time use and efforts to reduce implicit bias, and ways to support principals through research-practice partnerships. The third part, Chapters 9 through 13, considers how principals’ leadership practices are associated with several outcomes including teachers’ workplace attitudes, instruction, and retention; and student achievement. The fourth and final part, Chapters 14 and 15, explores how ESSA is likely to affect principal development and leadership practices and synthesizes lessons learned and guidelines for policy and practice from across the volume.

The second part starts with a chapter by Jennifer Steele, Elizabeth Steiner, and Laura Hamilton on efforts in one urban school district to enact a grow-your-own strategy for principal development. The program features a partnership between this district and TNTP (formerly The New Teacher Project). Using interpretive methodology including focus groups and one-on-one interviews, this chapter examines issues of equity and diversity in school leader development exploring the perspectives of school leaders-in-training during and after their two-year residencies in urban, high-poverty public school settings. The authors discuss the strengths of this leadership training model, including the program’s emphasis on job-embedded coaching, its summer institute and workshops, and support from peers. They also consider challenges such as imperfect alignment between program goals and district priorities, and lack of support for the Teacher Leader role.

In Chapter 3, Bryan VanGronigen, Kathleen Cunningham, Michelle Young, and Pamela Tucker investigate ways in which award-winning university-based educational leader preparation programs design and implement curricula that include powerful learning experiences (PLE). The PLEs discussed in this study target three dimensions of transformational learning: (a) they aid candidates in better understanding themselves (i.e., psychological); (b) they push candidates to revise their beliefs and values by discussing them with others (i.e., convictional); and (c) they enable candidates to implement what they were thinking and learning (i.e., behavioral). These conditions for transformational learning foster a cognitive shift among leadership candidates. The chapters by (a) Steele and colleagues and (b) VanGronigen and colleagues draw directly on the conception of effective leadership presented in this introductory chapter and are closely related to the chapters on principal leadership and teacher outcomes featured in the third part of the book.

In the fourth chapter, Mollie Rubin, Ellen Goldring, Michael Neel, Laura Rogers, and Jason Grissom examine ways to focus the principal supervisor role on instructional leadership support. The authors evaluated the Wallace Foundation’s Principal Supervisor Initiative (PSI), which featured large grants to six urban, high-poverty school districts to reimagine principal supervision as instructional leadership. District reforms included rewriting job descriptions, creating new supervisor training, reducing the number of schools that supervisors support, strengthening central office structures to support supervisors, and addressing succession planning. Drawing on survey and interview data, the authors describe how the districts changed the supervisor role, how supervisors changed their practices, and how principals experienced new relationships with supervisors more centered on leadership coaching and feedback. They discuss the potential for principal supervision to be a vehicle for principal support and summarize the main challenges that PSI districts encountered in enacting this new role. This chapter is tightly connected to the chapter by Donaldson and colleagues on district principal evaluation practices and the chapter by Reid, Galey-Horn, and Kim on how ESSA is likely to affect principals’ roles as instructional leaders.

In Chapter 5, Morgaen Donaldson, Madeline Mavrogordato, Peter Youngs, and Shaun Dougherty take a close look at state and school district policies and practices in the area of principal evaluation. In the past decade, nearly all states have revised their principal evaluation policies, prompting districts across the U.S. to rethink how they are evaluating school leaders. The new principal evaluation systems that emerge out of these policy reforms often couple increased accountability with a greater emphasis on development in an effort to spur continuous improvement in school leadership practices. However, there is limited literature documenting these major shifts in principal evaluation and the potential they hold for leadership improvement. This chapter describes current policies, briefly outlines the mechanisms through which principal evaluation might affect principal quality and other key outcomes, highlights key findings from research on principal evaluation, and offers promising lines for future research. The chapter by Donaldson and colleagues is informed by the introduction chapter’s notion of effective leadership and it is tightly connected to the chapters in the third part of the book as well as the chapter by Reid, Galey-Horn, and Kim on ESSA.

The second part focuses on how principals allocate their time, their efforts to reduce implicit bias, and ways that they can be supported through research-practice partnerships. In the sixth chapter, Craig Hochbein, Linda Mayger, and Bridget Dever use event sampling methodology to collect extensive data on principals’ time use over a 28-day period. In particular, this approach provides detailed information on the extent to which school leaders allocate time to instructional activities, managerial activities, and other responsibilities as well as the degree to which they engage in work-related activities by interacting with others vs. working alone. The authors’ findings have implications for the preparation of school leaders as well as efforts by districts to support and evaluate their work. This chapter is closely related to the two chapters on principal preparation and development (Chapters 3 and 4) and the chapter by Reid, Galey-Horn, and Kim. In particular, principals’ time use is likely to be shaped by their own professional development experiences and by ESSA.

In Chapter 7, Gina Gullo builds on recent research that connects school leaders’ and teachers’ implicit biases to student academic and disciplinary outcomes. She describes a number of strategies that allow school leaders to reduce the impacts of leader and teacher implicit bias on students and she presents a Justice for Bias Framework that can empower school leaders with tools for mitigating inequities that stem from biases in their schools. This framework focuses on strategies aimed at addressing biases in schools through leadership related to relationships, flexibility, and morality to create school-inclusive platforms for successful school equity endeavors. The strategies include guidance for decision-making, intergroup contact, mindfulness practices, bias awareness, and data-based decision-making. This chapter is linked to the chapters by (a) Steele and colleagues and (b) Rubin and colleagues that address principal development and supervision in urban, high-poverty school districts.

In the eighth chapter, Sarah Lilly addresses the complex relationship between principals and teachers, on one hand, and researchers and research evidence, on the other. The author argues that improvement science approaches are needed in both educational research and school improvement in which principals and teachers collaborate as co-equals with university scholars. She also considers ways that social network analysis can be employed to investigate principals’ access and use of research, their potential role in supporting teachers in research-practice partnerships (RPPs) with university researchers, and how they can address and overcome obstacles to RPPs and improvement science approaches. Her analysis suggests that universities should rethink the nature of research training for principals and that districts should provide time and other incentives for school leaders to participate in improvement science activities. This chapter draws on the conception of effective leadership presented in the introduction.

The third part starts with a chapter that explores associations between principal leadership and (a) first-year elementary teachers’ self-efficacy related to teaching mathematics and English language arts (ELA) and (b) their valuing of ambitious instructional practices. Lauren Molloy Elreda, Kim Evert, and Peter Youngs draw on survey data from 175 first-year teachers to consider direct feedback that beginning teachers receive from principals on general instructional practices (e.g., differentiating instruction, providing feedback to students) and ambitious instructional practices in mathematics and ELA (e.g., novices’ use of high cognitive demand tasks, facilitation of classroom discussion). The authors find that teachers valued several ambitious instructional practices when they received both general feedback from their principals and specific feedback from them on ambitious mathematics and ELA practices. In contrast, there were no associations between beginning teachers’ reported levels of self-efficacy with regard to teaching mathematics or ELA and (a) receiving principal feedback or (b) interactions with school-based teacher colleagues. This chapter is informed by the introduction chapter’s notion of effective leadership and is tightly connected with the chapters by Hochbein, Mayger, and Dever on principal-teacher interactions and Stark, Mathews, Bettini, and Jones on leadership and special education teacher instruction.

Chapter 10 investigates ways in which principals can promote effective teaching practices for students with disabilities (SWDs). Kristabel Stark, Hannah Mathews, Elizabeth Bettini, and Nathan Jones draw on a framework developed by Leithwood, Patten, and Jantzi (2010) to explore four key leadership activities: (a) setting direction, (b) developing people, (c) redesigning the organization, and (d) managing the instructional program. They cite research on each activity and explain how it is associated with high-quality instruction for SWDs. The authors also consider obstacles to effective leadership in special education, including principals’ lack of knowledge about instruction for SWDs; and identify implications of their analysis for principal preparation, professional development, and research. This chapter is informed by the introduction chapter’s notion of effective leadership and is tightly connected with the chapters by Hochbein, Mayger, and Dever; and Molloy Elreda, Evert, and Youngs.

Chapter 11 by Heather Price uses the Teaching and Learning International Survey (TALIS) 2018 database of 48 countries and provinces to examine the extent to which different principal leadership activities impact school-wide measures of teachers’ job satisfaction and commitment levels. She reports that teachers’ satisfaction with their schools is positively associated with principals’ providing feedback on teaching, teachers’ relationships with students, and their trust in other teachers; but negatively associated with principals’ efforts to arrange for teachers to collaborate. These findings seem to be due to teachers’ preference for direct interactions with school leaders and organic, teacher-initiated collaborative activities with other teachers as compared to attempts by principals to promote or even force collaboration among teachers.

In addition, Price finds that teachers’ professional satisfaction is positively linked with principals’ allocation of time to curriculum, teaching, and management; as well as teachers’ relationships with students. Finally, teachers’ commitment levels are positively associated with their relationships with students, but negatively associated with principals’ allocation of time to management and teachers’ trust in other teachers. This chapter builds on ideas about the importance of instructional coaching and feedback tasks of principals, as addressed in the chapter by Rubin and colleagues; and benefits from increased time for principal-teacher interactions, as discussed in the chapter by Hochbein, Mayger, and Dever.

In Chapter 12, Frank Perrone draws on data from a nationally representative dataset, the Beginning Teacher Longitudinal Survey (BTLS), to investigate how principal leadership and early career teacher (ECT) burnout are associated with ECTs’ turnover levels during their first three years of teaching. The author finds that ECTs who move to other schools or leave teaching rate lack of administrative support as one of the most important reasons for leaving their school of origin. In addition, in regression analyses, he reports that leadership is strongly associated with turnover while burnout is not significantly associated with this outcome. Finally, Perrone finds that teaching in a hard-to-fill position is not linked to either ECTs’ perceptions of principal leadership or their turnover levels. This chapter is closely connected to the introduction chapter’s notion of effective leadership.

In Chapter 13, Elaine Allensworth, James Sebastian, and Molly Gordon report on a longitudinal, mixed methods study that draws on data from Chicago elementary (grades K-8) and high schools between 2007–08 and 2013–14. Building on the Theory of Five Essential Supports (Bryk et al., 2010), the authors use structural equation modeling to examine the strength of different mediating processes between instructional leadership, instructional quality, and student achievement. The authors find that a safe, orderly, college-going culture with high academic expectations was the strongest mechanism through which instructional leadership was associated with high-quality school-wide classroom instruction and higher student achievement. They also report that teacher leadership contributed to principals’ ability to establish and maintain productive school climates. This chapter is linked to the conception of effective leadership presented in the introduction.

The fourth part features two chapters. In Chapter 14, David Reid, Sarah Galey-Horn, and Jihyun Kim analyz...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Preface
• List of Contributors
• 1 Introduction
• PART I. Principal Development and Evaluation
• PART II. Principal Leadership Practices
• PART III. Principal Leadership Practices and Teacher and Student Outcomes
• PART IV. Next Steps for Leadership Practice and Research
• Index