Beyond Principal Supervision: Examining Findings Across 10 Years of Inquiry

• In Event: Principal Supervisors as Drivers of School Improvement: Where Have We Been? What's Next?

Abstract

Central office reform initiatives increasingly call on principal supervisors to shift their roles from mainly operations, evaluation, and compliance monitoring toward supporting principals’ growth as instructional leaders. But what do principal supervisors who demonstrably support such results do day-to-day? Our earlier publications from one study of three districts associated such outcomes as principals’ increased time on instructional leadership and progressively deeper engagement in that leadership with principal supervisors who took a teaching-and-learning stance to their work (Honig, 2012, Honig, et al., 2010; Honig & Rainey, 2014). Such a stance involved specific moves such as modeling and differentiation. These findings are consistent with broader research on principals’ professional growth that highlights coaching from a teaching-and-learning stance with principal learning. But do the findings about principal supervisors as leaders of principals learning hold up across settings?

We have pursued that question by building out a broader data set on principal supervisors’ practice including our original three districts and expanding to a total of 10 involving 37 principal supervisors over 18 months in each district. The data set stems from 763.75 observation hours, 340 interviews and hundreds of documents related to principal supervisors’ charge and work with principals. We analyzed those data using ideas from socio-cultural learning theory about how professionals come to deepen their engagement in challenging and new work practices. In our previous publications, we used ideas from that theory about teaching-and-learning moves by mentors associated with such engagement. For this analysis we included a broader set of theoretical ideas, including the importance of learners’ agency to learning as well as organizational and institutional conditions beyond the mentoring relationship that affect professional learning of both the learner and the mentor.

Our results confirm the importance of principal supervisors taking a teaching-and-learning approach to their work with principals, both one-on-one in their schools and when convening principals in professional learning communities. However, our broader data set reveals that principal supervisors in the positive cases primarily help principals exercise agency over their own learning— for example, by engaging in systematic self-assessments of their own instructional leadership practice and designing and designing and implementing intentional plans to lead their own learning over the course of the year. Principal supervisors in the positive cases then sought to fill gaps in the individual learning plans by working with principals one-on-one in their schools and by focusing the scope-and-sequence of their learning community meetings.

This paper provides further rigorous empirical support for principal supervisors to shift from traditional forms of principal supervision to supporting principals’ growth as industrial leaders. These findings qualify that such support does not necessarily involve principal supervisors positioning themselves as the main leaders of principals’ learning. Rather, principal supervisors support principals’ growth as instructional leaders when they dedicate their time to helping principals lead their own learning, including supplementing principals’ own efforts with direct support from a teaching-and-learning approach. These findings run counter to professional development in many districts where the central office provides learning opportunities to principals rather than elevating principals’ professionalism to lead their own learning.

Authors

• Lydia Rainey, University of Washington

• Meredith I. Honig, University of Washington