Principals’ Instructional Leadership and Teacher Development: Teachers’ Perspectives

Abstract

In recent years, reflective, collaborative, inquiry-oriented approaches to supervision of teachers and teacher development have been discussed in the professional literature. However, few published studies have directly examined teachers’perspectives on principals’everyday instructional leadership characteristics and the impact of those characteristics on teachers. This article describes the everyday strategies of principals practicing exemplary instructional leadership and how these principals influenced teachers. The data were drawn from a qualitative study of more than 800 teachers in the southeastern, midwestern, and northwestern United States. An open-ended questionnaire was designed to provide teachers with the opportunity to identify and describe in detail the characteristics of principals that enhanced their classroom instruction and what impact those characteristics had on them. Inductive analyses of the data generated two major themes comprising 11 strategies, which were used to construct the Reflection-Growth (RG) model of instructional leadership. This article emphasizes those strategies and the meanings teachers identified with them.