Principal Attributes and Teachers' Returns to Experience (Poster 12)

• In Event: Promising Scholarship in Education Research: Dissertation Fellows and Their Research

Abstract

Evidence suggests that teachers improve as they accrue experience, particularly in supportive environments. Principals play an important role in shaping teachers’ work environments and principal effectiveness is one of the most important factors driving teacher satisfaction and turnover. Principals likely have even stronger effects on teachers’ growth due to their role in conducting observations, providing feedback, creating professional learning opportunities, and building a productive school climate. However, the literature linking principals and their characteristics to teacher growth is thin. The current dissertation addresses this gap in the literature using a longitudinal state dataset to estimate the extent to which teacher returns to experience vary by principal attributes such as principals’ years of experience, tenure in their school, and the extent to which they engage in instructional leadership practices. I model student test scores and teacher observation scores as a function of teachers’ years of experience and principal measures to investigate whether teachers whose principals embody particular characteristics or exhibit certain behaviors grow more rapidly with experience, controlling for fixed teacher characteristics. These results are of interest to stakeholders seeking strategies for targeting recruitment into the principalship, strategically retaining strong principals, selecting principals to serve as peer mentors and improving principal training and professional development.

Author

• Hannah Kistler, Annenberg Institute, Brown University
  Presenting Author