Principal Leadership Practices that Promote Teacher Learning in School-Wide Reform

• In Event: 56.059 - Examining How Principals Engage With Discipline-Specific Instructional Reforms

Abstract

Objective
There is evidence that teachers’ professional communities play an important role in school reform (McLaughlin & Talbert, 2001). While the literature describes the importance of principals making time for teachers to meet together (Elmore, Peterson, & McCarthey, 1996), we know little about the instructional leadership practices that support teacher learning. In this paper, we examine the case of a “failing” school (Hilltop elementary) in which an elementary principal worked closely with coaches and teachers to help counter a recent history of poor performance and deficit narratives. The principal helped build a school community in which teachers’ professional work lives were reorganized towards ambitious and equitable mathematics instruction, and thus learning opportunities for students, producing dramatic improvements in learning school-wide. This case analysis examines closely the principal’s work to support teachers’ ongoing learning.

Theoretical framework
Our perspectives on principal’s practices are informed by a sociocultural perspective. We attended to the practices of a community including how goals, tools, organizational routines, and assistance enable growth across the system. Our central research questions are:
(1) How did the principal organize time and space to create workplace practices that support growth in teachers’ planning, data use, and instruction?
(2) What resources and tools did principals employ and how did those resources and tools mediate the development of workplace practices that support teacher learning?

Methods
To understand how leadership practices at Hilltop elementary were organized and enacted to support teachers’ collective learning and systemic change in mathematics instruction, we observed over 40 events of the principal and coach’s work with teachers over the course of year 4 of an ongoing school reform. Using StudioCode, we analyzed the interactions between principal and teachers; principal and coach; how tools, routines, and norms supported the interactions; and what and how school-level contexts supported interactions.

Results
Our analysis revealed key aspects that assisted the principal to support the collective capacity across the system: (a) a vision for high quality and equitable mathematics instruction, (b) a vision for organizational learning and the improvement of practice – treating the grade level as the unit of change, (c) sustained time for inquiry into teaching with expectation for close examination of mathematics, pedagogy, and student reasoning, (d) ongoing planning meetings with the coach where they discussed how to press teachers to take up high quality instructional practices and the support teachers needed, (e) an annual focus on improving instruction communicated to teachers in different settings and through evaluations, and (f) hiring practices that include inducting new teachers into the learning environment. Our analysis elaborates on how these conditions were integrated into a system that enabled the leadership team to help create a coherent and high-quality professional learning system across the school.

Significance
Many principals face the challenge of better supporting students’ learning of significant disciplinary ideas. Our findings examined a school in which the principal helped design and integrate organizational routines into a coherent and connected learning system, resulting in a reorganization of principal, coach, and teacher workplace practices that lead to school-wide reform.

Authors

• Elham Kazemi, University of Washington

• Lynsey K. Gibbons, Boston University