New Principals and Teacher Development: Conceptions, Changes, and Challenges

• In Event: Roundtable Session 90
  In Roundtable Session: On Becoming a School Principal: Novice Principals Make Sense of a New Role

Abstract

Objectives or purposes: Recent education reform has emphasized the importance of teacher learning and development in improving classroom instruction and raising student achievement. Viewing the school principal as having a primary impact on teachers’ professional growth and their working conditions, this study aims to understand new elementary school principals’ conceptions of their role in supporting teacher development and examine whether and how these ideas change during their first year in the principalship.

Perspective(s) or theoretical framework: This study builds upon and extends work suggesting principals can help teachers improve their practice by engaging in conversations about student work, facilitating opportunities for teacher collaboration, providing teachers with leadership opportunities, and working to establish norms of collegiality among school staff (Drago-Severson, 2007; Witziers, Bosker, & Kruger, 2003). In addition, this study will incorporate work on organizational socialization (Van Maanen, 1976) and sense-making (Louis, 1980) in order to understand the variety of ways in which novice principals come to understand their new roles and how they address the surprises and challenges related to teacher development.

Data and Methods: The data for this study come primarily from interviews with a cohort of newly hired school principals. A subsample of 18 brand new Chicago Public Schools elementary school principals was interviewed at three time points during their first year on the job. Data were coded in NVivo using a grounded theory approach aimed at identifying patterns in the longitudinal data regarding principals’ strategies for support teacher development.

Results and/or substantiated conclusions or warrants for arguments/point of view:
Results suggest that before the school year began, principals’ approaches to supporting teacher development differed along two key dimensions—the extent to which they planned to work directly with teachers in their classrooms to support instructional improvement and the extent to which they worked to implement structures to support teacher learning in their schools. As the year progressed, principals encountered challenges in their schools that led them to shift their approached and nearly all of the principals ended the year believing that creating structures to facilitate teacher learning was an important aspect of their job. However, half of the new principals faced substantial teacher resistance, which they believed hindered their efforts at supporting instructional improvement.

Scientific or scholarly significance of the study or work: While researchers have begun to uncover the specific attitudes and actions of those principals who are most effective at supporting teachers, there are a number of areas in which the research is thin. Although urban school districts have high proportions of novice principals (Stoelinga, 2008), researchers have yet to adequately examine the ideas with which novice principals enter the profession and how those ideas evolve during their first year on the job. In addition, work on principals’ support of teacher development has rarely addressed why principals behave the way they do (Witziers, et al., 2003). Undertaking such an examination could inform the knowledge base on how to prepare and support school leaders who are able to help teachers improve their practice.

Author

• Leigh Mesler Parise, Northwestern University