Organizational and Institutional Supports for Principal Supervision as Teaching-and-Learning

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

Abstract

Various surveys and journalistic accounts of principal supervisors suggest that principal supervisors’ success depends on various supports including a small case load of principals and a redesign of their job descriptions to emphasize their support for principals’ instructional leadership (Corcoran, et al., 2013; Goldring, et al., 2018; Rainey & Honig, 2017). But these reports tend to identify conditions principal supervisors self-report as mattering to their job generally—and not specifically to whether or not they take a teaching-and-learning approach to their work. Further, most of the conditions identified in these reports are districtwide, which does not account for within-district variation in principal supervision. Nor do these findings rest on theory or other rationale connecting the reported conditions with actual results. Broader research on fundamental changes in professional practice of central office leaders and other professionals suggest that fundamental change is the exception rather than the rule—and typically impeded practitioners’ prior knowledge which biases professionals toward interpreting new demands as slight variations on their long standing practice (Barley, 1986; Cohen, 1990; Spillane, et al., 2002). Such research also highlights the importance of professionals having ongoing opportunities to learn about the new ideas and grapple with how to integrate them into their practice. What conditions help principal supervisors fundamentally shift their roles to take a teaching-and-learning approach to supporting principals’ growth as instructional leaders?

We addressed that question with an analysis of the 10 district-data set we introduced in Paper 3 that includes 763.75 observation hours, 340 interviews, and hundreds of documents. We used socio-cultural learning theory since it identifies various conditions that matter to fundamental professional change including prior knowledge and access to ongoing professional learning opportunities and mapped the presence of each support to individual principal supervisors and changes in their practice vis-à-vis their principals.

We found that, contrary to extant research, high-quality outside coaching was not associated with the positive cases of principal supervision. Nor did hiring principal supervisors with requisite prior knowledge or reducing principal supervisors’ “span of control” explain why some principal supervisors regressed and others grew in their capacity to take a teaching-and-learning approach to their work with their principals. Instead our findings underscore the importance of Supervisors of Principal Supervisors being principal supervisors’ main mentors and principal supervisors not over-relying on others for assistance but actively leading their own learning, especially through work with colleagues and protecting their own time to devote to the new work of principal supervision.

This paper reinforces the importance of leadership to supporting professional growth and expands that finding to include Chief Academic Officers, Superintendents, and other executive-level district administrators as essential to the professional growth of their central office staff, such as principal supervisors. Extant research on educational leadership tends to focus on professional learning as designed and provided by people other than the learners themselves. Our research emphasizes agency in learning and, in this case, the importance of educational leaders like principal supervisors leading their own learning.

Authors

• Meredith I. Honig, University of Washington

• Lydia Rainey, University of Washington