School principals are expected to be the instructional leaders of their buildings. But what does it mean to be an “instructional leader”? Imagine yourself as a first-year principal. Before you step into the position, you have an idea about what it means to be an instructional leader from your own experience as a teacher, and perhaps as an assistant principal. Added to your understanding are the lessons from your principal preparation program. In your first year, you receive many more messages: from your supervisor, the framework used to evaluate your performance, the expectations from the central office (often influenced by accountability pressures from the state), from the teachers at your school, perhaps from a mentor or coach, and from other connections and bodies of information (such as personal friends and professional associations). How do you make sense of all of these messages, especially when they either explicitly or implicitly indicate distinct actions?

In a recently published article, Principals’ Conceptions of Instructional Leadership and Their Informal Social Networks: An Exploration of the Mechanisms of the Mesolevel, I examine six first-year principals’ conceptions of instructional leadership as a way to disentangle the interactions between ideas in the institutional environment and what happens in schools and classrooms. Why were some ideas salient to a principal, and others disregarded? I used social network analysis as a way to first, map the connections the focal principals made to others related to instructional leadership, as identified by the principals themselves, and second, classify the content of connection to distinct ideas of instructional leadership. In this way, I was able to see how the focal principals conceptualized their roles as instructional leaders, to which areas in the institutional environment they found the messages salient, and the variance in the content of the messages.

This analysis relies on previous findings about sets of ideas and associated actions in the institutional environment, or the logics of instructional leadership. I argue there are three distinct, yet overlapping, logics of instructional leadership most relevant to the principals in this study: the prevailing logic, a broad and flexible set of ideas, easily implemented across a wide variety of school settings; the entrepreneurial logic, which emphasizes specific actionable practices that lead to increases in student achievement as measured by standardized test scores; and the social justice logic, focused on the experiences and inequitable outcomes of marginalized students and leadership practices that address these outcomes through a focus on process. These logics do not fit neatly into their own boxes: they are dynamic, overlap, and conflict. Concurrently, they do have distinct messages that are important to parse out as they imply different leadership actions that are meaningful for classroom practice, and therefore student learning opportunities.

While the principals received multiple and differing messages, they mainly selected those with the same belief as their preparation program as salient.

While all six focal principals were exposed to messages about instructional leadership that invoked the three logics, I found that principals who attended preparation programs with a strong theory of action and a cohort model were more likely to nominate connections with the same conception of instructional leadership as their program. In other words, while the principals received multiple and differing messages, they mainly selected those with the same belief as their preparation program as salient. This is an important finding for both practice and theory.

In practice, school districts provide both mandates and professional development to influence their principals’ leadership actions. This analysis suggests that, unless the embedded notions of instructional leadership are aligned with the principals’ perspectives, it is unlikely that the principals will take them up in practice. Further, the findings highlight the importance of principal preparation programs beyond increasing student test scores (currently a common way to evaluate programs’ efficacy); the ideas about what it means to be an instructional leader will likely permeate graduates’ conceptions and associated practices with some permanence. Finally, this study provides new information about the content of the social network exchange. The findings build on previous research on the content of interaction in networks by identifying beliefs as another type of information and knowledge that spreads through networks.

Principals are important for what happens in classrooms. This study shows that understanding the development of new principals requires more than understanding their emerging thoughts and practices within the walls of the schools. Rather, it requires attention to institutional ideas in the environment and informal social networks as key elements that both enable and hinder principals’ conceptions of what it means to be instructional leaders.

 

Jessica G. Rigby is an assistant professor in Education Policy, Organizations, and Leadership in P12 Systems at the College of Education at the University of Washington. She uses lenses from organizational sociology to understand the role of school and district leaders in the implementation of policy and improving teacher practice.