PurposeAs they operate in complex schools principals must allocate their attention to numerous responsibilities. This paper seeks to ask three questions: how do principals allocate their attention across major realms of responsibility; to what extent do principals in different contexts emphasize different realms of responsibility; and to what extent do individual attributes affect how principals allocate their attention across realms?Design/methodology/approachA cluster analysis is applied to data from a daily log of principal practices to identify principals who allocate their attention across major realms of responsibility in similar ways. With the three groups identified in the cluster analysis a discriminant analysis is then used to examine the individual attributes of the principals and the contexts within which these groups work to identify those individual characteristics and contextual conditions that best predict each principal's cluster membership.FindingsThe data from the log indicate that principals are not as fragmented across numerous realms of responsibility as previous research suggests. Some principals do spend considerable time on instructional leadership. The cluster analysis revealed three groups: “Eclectic” Leaders (their activities are distributed more evenly across different activities); Instructional Leaders (they focused most on Instructional Leadership); and Student Leaders (they emphasized student affairs). In the paper's discriminant analyses no individual attributes distinguished amongst the three types of principals; only contextual conditions predicted membership.Research limitations/implicationsThe results point to the influence that context plays on school principals' practice; principals appear to prioritize and focus their actions under more challenging contextual conditions. The next step in the analysis is to determine how the leadership clusters and principal practices relate to important school outcomes.Originality/valueThe paper provides useful information on influences on school principals' practice.

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We present a multi-phase coaching model that was implemented to help principals improve their instructional leadership practices. We then discuss a rubric based on this coaching model that we used to evaluate coaches’ implementation of key model phases and to identify principals’ responses to the coaching. After presenting the leadership coaching model, we introduce the implementation rubrics, and then we present contrasting cases from our analyses that illustrate two principals’ varying responses to coaching. We discuss how their coaches differed in two key dimensions of implementation: dose and the quality of program delivery. We conclude with a discussion of how these findings can inform development of future educational leadership coaching programs and guide additional research to evaluate the impact of coaching.

In this paper we described how we mixed research approaches in a Randomized Control Trial (RCT) of a school principal professional development program. Using examples from our study we illustrate how combining qualitative and quantitative data can address some key challenges from validating instruments and measures of mediator variables to examining how contextual factors interact

We as a field believe that school principals can acquire new expertise by participating in principal preparation and professional development programs; however, we have few methodologies to measure leadership expertise, especially expertise that links leadership to improved student learning. In this article, we present the results of a study that examines two instruments for measuring leadership expertise, principal surveys and open-ended scenarios. First we make the case regarding the need for measurements of expertise. Next we discuss the conceptual definitions of expertise in general and present the specific domains of leadership expertise we attempt to measure. Finally, we present the results of a study that implemented two measures of leadership expertise: principal surveys and open-ended scenarios. The descriptive statistics, correlations, and examples we present in this article offer mixed results regarding the strengths and weaknesses of the various methods to conceptualize and measure leadership expertise.