Becoming an Instructional Leader: Principal Learning of Fundamentally New Leadership Practice

• In Event: Developing and Measuring Instructional Leadership

Abstract

Principals across the country are increasingly called on to support teacher learning and instruction as instructional leaders, often requiring fundamentally new forms of leadership practice. We propose a framework for conceptualizing the learning of practicing principals as an ongoing, intertwined process of knowing, doing, and becoming that occurs within the context of a significant institutional shift in expectations for competent practice. We examine the utility of the framework with the case of one research-practice partnership’s effort to support principal learning of a context-specific vision of instructional leadership. Findings indicate that new ways of knowing, doing, and being co-developed and were intertwined with principal approaches to reconciling what they perceived as conflicting expectations for being managers, evaluators, and “lead learner.”

Authors

• Alison Fox Resnick, University of Washington - Seattle

• Elham Kazemi, University of Washington