Purpose: This study examines conceptions of instructional leadership in the institutional environment. We know that principals’ practices affect student learning and that principals are influenced by ideas in the broader environment. This article examines and defines the multiple conceptions of what it means for principals to be instructional leaders. Research Methods/Approach: This empirical article relies on the methodology of content analysis. Refinements of the conceptions of instructional leadership were done through iterative data collection and analyses cycles. Findings: I define three conceptions of instructional leadership in the institutional environment that I term prevailing, entrepreneurial, and social justice logics. The ubiquitous prevailing logic was broad and flexible without explicit goals or directions for principals as instructional leaders. From this ambiguous conception, the two alternatives highlighted particular practices and backgrounded others. The entrepreneurial conception relied on innovations and mechanisms borrowed from the private sector, including a reliance on data and specific leadership actions. The social justice logic focused on the experiences and inequitable outcomes of marginalized groups, challenging the current “neutral” systems that engender the reproduction of inequity in our schools. Implications for Research and Practice: This study contributes to the field by providing a language that can help specify what “instructional leadership” looks like in practice and conceptions, thus explicating the tacit and ambiguous term. This is important for researchers to understand and explore the impact of the principalship on student achievement, and for principal preparation programs and school districts to assume a common language in expectations, professional development, and evaluation.

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to look across six first-year principals to investigate their engagement with and sensemaking of specific messages of instructional leadership around teacher evaluation. Design/methodology/approach – This research project, a cross-case study, was carried out using in-depth qualitative observations and interviews of six first-year principals over one school year. Sensemaking theory was used to analyze both how and the mechanisms through which principals understood their roles as teacher evaluators. Findings – The results demonstrate that first, principals received a variety of messages about how to conduct teacher evaluations, and second, that connections to specific individuals influenced their associations to specific messages they received about instructional leadership and how they enacted teacher evaluation practices on their campuses. Research limitations/implications – This is an in-depth qualitative analysis, and therefore is not generalizable to all first-year principals, school districts, or principal preparation programs. However, it adds to the field’s understanding of the meso level of policy implementation, highlighting the process of individuals’ sensemaking and the importance of their informal connections in the associations they make to messages about instructional leadership. Practical implications – This research adds to the field of principal preparation and induction as it highlights what is important for first-year principals as they build their professional identities. Further, it highlights the variability in principals’ understanding and enactment of teacher evaluation policies, an important feature as this practice is coming to the fore both in current practice and research. Originality/value – This study adds to an understanding of institutional theory by looking at the interaction between the organizational levels, and further explicates individual actors’ agency within a socio-organizational context. The findings also add to a dearth of empirical studies on the routine of teacher evaluation from the principal perspective.

Instructional coaching has emerged as a prevalent and much-lauded instrument for capacity building. This essay argues that coaching can be aligned with teacher evaluation systems to work toward the effective implementation of instructional reforms, including Common Core State Standards and Next Generation Science Standards. Within the current policy context, coaching can support reform by (a) developing shared understandings, (b) modeling practices, and (c) brokering ideas. We discuss examples of coaches’ leadership actions related to the evaluation process, thus illustrating the potential for coaching to promote coherence in instructional improvement. We conclude by discussing barriers to the enactment of reform-aligned coaching as well as implications for leaders positioned at multiple levels of the education system.

This study examines the content and efficacy of instructional leaders' expectations and feedback (press) in relation to the improvement of middle school mathematics teachers' instruction in the context of coherent systems of supports. Research Method/Approach: This mixed methods study is a part of a larger, 8-year longitudinal study in four large urban school districts across the United States. We used transcripts of interview data, surveys, and video recordings of instruction of 271 cases, over 4 years, to determine the content of administrator press, as reported by teachers, and the relationship between the content and change (if any) in instruction. To do so we used qualitative coding of interview transcripts, and ran a series of statistical models to examine the nature of the variance in and impact of administrative press.

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