Instructional Leadership

Instructional Leadership: Texes Principal



Instructional Leadership: Texes Principal

The term “instructional leadership” derives from early attempts to explain the unexpectedly higher achievement of low-socioeconomic status students in high-poverty schools during the 1970s.

Increasingly, state and federal education policies used effective schools research, and school administrators demanded a sharpened and practical definition of instructional leadership. Today, the research community is engaged in a continuing effort to find a definitive explanation of complexities of leadership practices in proximity to, but still distant from, the core interactions associated with student achievement: learning and teaching (English, 2004).

The issue of availability of empirical literature on instructional leadership represents a limitation of this chapter. Many of the primary sources on the topic of instructional leadership represent positions about the conceptualization of instructional leadership. These positions are important steps in establishing the foundation for empirical investigations of instructional leadership; however, such discourses also produce frustrating paralysis in the reiterative knowledge development processes, including (a) description of phenomena, (b) variable definition, (c) instrumentation, (d) measurement, and (e) hypothesis testing.

Seemingly, the volume of opinionated descriptions surrounding phenomena associated with the construct of instructional leadership overwhelms empirical reports. Furthermore, the overabundance of conceptual debates stalls progress toward empirical testing given the “loose definition of theoretical orientation” among the small number of emerging empirical studies of instructional leadership.

In contrast to Hallinger's (2003) retrospective, which concludes that instructional leadership speaks to individual practice, work by Camburn, Rowan, and Taylor (2003) uses instructional leadership as a subconstruct in a study examining distributed leadership. Their study represents an example of a different and independent conceptualization of instructional leadership.

These researchers seek to understand how shared leadership includes instructional leadership as a collective practice, not an individual practice. Camburn and colleagues investigate distributed leadership in schools using federally funded comprehensive school reform models. These researchers construct a survey that includes four instructional leadership subconstructs—setting instructional goals, developing instructional capacity, coordinating curriculum, and monitoring improvement— among multiple measures of shared leadership. They conclude that instructional leadership could be exhibited by more members of the professional community than just principals.

This small sampling of the conceptual work behind the construct of instructional leadership reveals two features about the challenges in conceptualizing the construct. First, the debates over the construct are more oblique than direct. That is, the literature with opinions about instructional leadership seems to be uninformed by empirical work testing constructs associated with instructional leaders' observed or measured practices. Among those studies validating various constructs of instructional leadership, few build on the work of others or even test competing constructions of instructional leadership for both theoretical/practical validity and reliability. Marks and Printy's (2003) research recognizes the conceptual contributions of Hallinger and Leithwood in addressing the constructs of instructional leadership, transformational leadership, and change. In particular, they designed their study of principals' influence on school performance to further describe the reciprocal effects of leadership and investigated it as a shared model (Forsyth, 2009).

Although more and more sophisticated techniques have been applied to the study of the ways in ...