District Central Office Leadership as Teaching: How Central Office Administrators Support Principals’ Development as Instructional Leaders

• In Event: Central Office-School Relationships in Support of School Improvement: Reconceptualizing the Problem and What’s Promising

Abstract

Research on educational leadership underscores the importance of principals operating as instructional leaders, intensive job-embedded supports for such work, and new learning-focused partnerships between central offices and schools as fundamental to the provision of such supports (Barnes, et al., 2010; Fink & Resnick, 2001; Hubbard, et al. 2006). However, extant research teaches little about what such learning-focused support relationships between central offices and schools entail and actually suggests that such relationships are unlikely to be realized in practice. After all, school district central offices were set up at the turn of the last century to have regulatory and business-focused relationships with schools not learning-focused support relationships. A growing handful of districts across the country are working to buck such institutional trends and develop partnerships between a team of executive-level central office staff and principals specifically focused on helping principals become stronger instructional leaders. Unlike the occasional coaching for principals available through some professional development units, these central office staff members reported directly to their superintendents or the equivalent and were charged with working with principals as close to 100% of the time as possible on strengthening their instructional leadership. How did central office staff and school principals participate in these relationships? With what results? What conditions helped or hindered them in the process?

This paper addresses those questions with a comparative case study of three urban school districts that made such partnerships a cornerstone of their efforts to fundamentally transform their central offices into learning support organizations. Our conceptual framework, drawn from socio-cultural learning theory, helped focus our data collection and analysis on specific practices within learning-focused partnerships that strengthen professional practice (citations). Our data sources included 282 interviews and approximately 265 observation hours and 200 documents.

Our findings elaborate specific practices central office administrators used in their work with principals that we associated with positive outcomes related to strengthening principals’ instructional leadership. These practices included differentiation, modeling, developing and using tools, and brokering resources in support of principals’ instructional leadership. We also found central office staff focused intentionally on helping principals value their own growth as instructional leaders and working in partnership with central office staff on such practices, consistent with theory’s emphasis on learning as “joint work.” Whereas in previous work we and some others have characterized central office administration as learning, these findings reflect a view of central office administration as teaching and relationships between central office and school leaders as “assistance relationships.” Key mediators of these new relationships included the number of principals the central office staff, principals’ readiness to engage in such relationships, the match between central office staffs’ role expectations and their work demands, and the system of support for their work. We discuss how advancing such relationships between central office and school staff in practice will require significant shifts throughout school district systems. We elaborate how building systematic knowledge about such relationships demands new approaches to the study of district organizations and leadership.

Author

• Meredith I. Honig, University of Washington