The School Principal's Workday: Portraits of the Principal at Practice

• In Event: 29.022 - Principals' Practices in Different Contexts: Behavior, Organizational Change, and Sensemaking

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to examine the workday of school principals in urban settings and examine how principals distribute their time working on various functions/domains and how they distribute their time working alone and with other school personnel. The study utilized HLM to analyze End of Day (EOD) log data collected at multiple points between 2005 and 2007. We find little support for the notion that typical leadership tasks are characterized by brevity. We also found that variation in principals’ practice is domain dependent. Principals spend most of their time working with within-building colleagues. We find that hour-of-day is the strongest predictor of principal time allocation patterns; day of week, semester, and school context are weak predictors.

Authors

• James Sebastian, University of Missouri - Columbia

• Eric M. Camburn, University of Wisconsin

• James P. Spillane, Northwestern University