Learning Forward
Equity and excellence in teaching and learning.
IDEAS
The principal’s role has changed
Is professional learning keeping up?
By Rebecca A. Thessin and Karen Seashore Louis
Categories: Leadership, Learning designs, Learning systems/planning, School leadershipApril 2020
Vol 41, No. 2
Does this scenario sound familiar? Principals are called to districtwide professional learning four to eight times a year. Central office administrators give presentations on new district initiatives, curriculum, protocols, and procedures. Administrators listen, sometimes for hours, to new information that district-level administrators believe they need. For most principals, this format hasn’t changed for several decades. Yet today’s principals do not have the same job as they did 20 years ago. Performance-based accountability measures have increasingly impacted the demands placed on school leaders, as have increased expectations to ramp up direct instructional leadership (Fusarelli & Fusarelli, 2018). Furthermore, research shows that this passive approach has little impact on practice if not accompanied by job-embedded follow-up learning and support (Curry & Killion, 2009; Zepeda, 2013). We must
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Thessin, R.A. (2019). Establishing productive principal/principal supervisor partnerships for instructional leadership. Journal of Educational Administration 57(5), 463-483.
Thessin, R.A. & Louis, K.S. (2019). The role of districts and other agencies in supporting school leaders’ instructional leadership. Journal of Educational Administration 57(5), 434-444.
U.S. Department of Education. (2016). Non-regulatory guidance for Title II, Part A: Building systems of support for excellent teaching and learning. https://www2.ed.gov/policy/elsec/leg/essa/essatitleiipartaguidance.pdf
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Karen Seashore Louis (klouis@umn.edu) is Regents Professor of Organizational Leadership, Policy, and Development and the Robert H. Beck Chair of Ideas in Education at the University of Minnesota.
Categories: Leadership, Learning designs, Learning systems/planning, School leadership
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