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Policy Framework
In increasingly common currency is the idea that effective school principals, in addition to being managers and disciplinarians, must be instructional leaders of their schools — that is, they should convey to their staff members a common vision of what good instruction looks like, provide teachers with the resources and supports they need to be effective in the classroom, and monitor the performance of teachers and students. In theory, special training can help equip principals to perform their instructional leadership role more effectively. In addition, training for those who supervise principals — in most school districts of any size, administrators who occupy intermediate positions in the district hierarchy between the superintendent and school-level leaders — can also ensure stronger instructional leadership.
For some time now, the Institute for Learning (IFL) at the University of Pittsburgh has been working with school districts to improve the instructional leadership capacities of principals and their intermediary supervisors. MDRC is working with IFL to study the effects of these training efforts on leaders’ actions, on teaching practices, and on student outcomes.
Agenda, Scope, and Goals
Although the term “instructional leadership” is widely used, researchers have only just begun to specify what good instructional leaders actually do. Nor has there been much study of how leaders’ actions flow through a social and organizational system to create learning opportunities for students. The Instructional Leadership Study is designed to fill these gaps in our understanding.
The study addresses the following questions:
- What are the roles, functions, and specific instructional leadership actions of intermediary supervisors and principals?
- Do these correspond with the leadership behaviors that IFL has hypothesized to be effective in improving classroom instruction and student outcomes?
- How are the actions of educational leaders linked to teachers’ instructional practices and to student achievement? Specifically, do schools with leaders who demonstrate more leadership actions of the type promoted by IFL experience greater improvements in student achievement over time than schools whose leaders exhibit fewer of these actions?
The study’s findings are intended to provide guidance to district and school leaders about how they can act effectively to improve teaching and learning.
Design, Sites, and Data Sources
The study will create measures of leadership behaviors and relate these to measures of instructional practice and student outcomes. It will use an interrupted time series design to examine the change over time in student achievement at each school. In this analysis, we will project the trend in student achievement in the period before the study began into the follow-up period, and compare this trend with the actual change occurring during follow-up. We will also measure leadership behaviors and instructional practices at the beginning of the study and through the follow-up period. We will then be able to determine whether improvements in student achievement patterns over and above what would be predicted by the school’s history of achievement are larger at schools that experience larger changes in leadership behaviors and in instructional practices.
The study is going forward in three urban disticts — Austin, Texas; Saint Paul, Minnesota; and Region 10 of New York City (an area that includes Central Harlem and Washington Heights). These districts have large proportions of disadvantaged, minority, and low-performing students and are partnering with IFL to put in place major instructional leadership efforts. Across the three districts, 49 schools — primarily schools with a history of low student achievement and located in low-income communities — are participating in the study.
The study employs a variety of data sources. Three rounds of surveys of intermediary supervisors, principals, and teachers, complemented by qualitative research at selected case study schools, constitute the key source of data on leadership behaviors. Classroom observations, as well as surveys and collection of student work, provide information on teachers’ instructional practices. And student scores on standardized tests, available from records maintained by the districts, serve as measures of student achievement.
What's Next
Data collection began in the 2005-2006 school year. A report of the study's findings was released in December 2007.
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