The Principal’s Role Has Changed

IDEAS

The principal’s role has changed

By Rebecca A. Thessin and Karen Seashore Louis

April 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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Authors

Rebecca A. Thessin and Karen Seashore Louis

Rebecca A. Thessin (rthessin@gwu.edu) is assistant professor of educational administration at The George Washington University in Washington, D.C. 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.

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