Positive Patterns of Principal Participation That Promote Reform Practice Enactment

• In Event: Designing for the Next Generation of Teaching Practices With a Networked Improvement Community: A Longitudinal Study of Local Adaptation and Improvement

Abstract

Purpose: Leveraging iterative, inductive, qualitative analysis, this paper explores the degree to which principals integrated the science reform with their views of other school priorities and how that impacted the extent of opportunities available to teachers to work with reform practices. The more often principals co-participated with teachers in making sense of reform practices in the context of classroom enactments, the more likely principals were to employ a broader array of school leadership practices to support the reform enactment, and the greater the extent to which teachers engaged and became proficient with the reform practices. This study provides additional details outlining contextual factors at play in determining how principals’ sense-making and school leadership practices influenced reform enactments.

Framework:
This study builds on Fullan & Quinn’s ideas about coherent practices (2016) and Spillane’s (2015) articulated links between the sphere of administrative practice with instruction by examining specific administrative practices (Leithwood, 2012), principals’ sense-making about reform practices, and the impact on teacher enactment of discipline-specific instructional reform.

Methods:
I applied a multiple case study qualitative analysis to investigate how principals and assistant principals made sense of an initiative to reform science instructional practices and how that sense-making translated to school leadership practices, ultimately influencing the enactment of the science instructional reform in their buildings.

Data Sources:
Principal discussions/interviews, instructional walk conversations, and principal surveys provided the primary data to examine principals’ sense-making about the reform. Principal and coach interviews, teacher and principal surveys, and principal learning walk discussions provided data about school leadership practices, including principals’ interactions with teachers. Data about engagement with reform yielded primarily from teacher surveys and researcher logs of studio days, classroom observations, and data meetings.

Results:
Key findings from this study include the importance of principals attending to the ongoing process of setting, adjusting and reinforcing direction through all of their leadership practices in ways that help to align both vision and practices around instructional change. Arguably the most significant element in helping to align direction and practices with the reform efforts was ongoing development of principals’ own capacities through co-participation in reform activities at the core of instructional practices. Additionally, collaboration time for teachers and greater alignment with instructional coach supports contributed substantially to more extensive and proficient reform enactments.

Significance: These findings help to explain how and why particular school leadership practices reinforce or reduce the barriers of influence caused by loose coupling (Elmore, 2000) between leadership practices and instruction. This study exposes the ongoing cycle of direction setting that all leadership practices, regardless of intent, contribute to, by reinforcing, connecting, supporting or marginalizing particular priorities. This study provides further evidence into why Fullan & Quinn’s (2016) push towards focusing on advancing the learning and practices of the group, and not just the individuals in it, further contributes to the cycle of direction setting. Additionally, it reinforces the need for school leaders to participate as lead learners, particularly with respect to the impact of such co-participation on establishing a more coherent system to promote instructional change.

Author

• Christine Chew, Self-employed