Purpose:The leadership of the principal is known to be a key factor in supporting student achievement, but how that leadership is experienced and instructionally enacted by teachers is much less clear. The purpose of this study was to examine various factors that are often present in principal-teacher interactions and teacher-teacher relationships to see how those may have an impact on teachers' classroom instructional practices. Data Collection and Analysis: Data for this quantitative study are from a teacher survey developed for the national research project, Learning from Leadership, funded by the Wallace Foundation. There are 4,165 completed surveys in the database, which reflects responses from teachers in grades K-12 in a sample of schools across the United States. Using a conceptual framework based on various known components of effective schools today, a stepwise linear regression examined the relationships among practices such as shared leadership and professional community with contextual variables such as trust and efficacy. Findings: Three types of instructional behaviors-Standard Contemporary Practice, Focused Instruction, and Flexible Grouping Practices-emerged as strong factors which operationally described effective teacher practice. The presence of shared leadership and professional community explain much of the strength among the three instructional variables. Furthermore, the effect of teachers' trust in the principal becomes less important when shared leadership and professional community are present. Self-efficacy strongly predicts Focused Instruction, but it has less predictive value for the other measures of instructional behavior. Individual teacher characteristics of gender and years of experience have clear impact on instructional practice, but there are no discernible patterns that suggest that the level of the principal (elementary vs. secondary) have more or less influence on teacher instructional behaviors. Conclusions: Increasing our knowledge about what leaders do and how they have an impact on the instructional behaviors of teachers will lead us to a better understand-ing of how leadership has a direct relationship to improved student achievement. These findings create a clearer picture of teacher-principal and teacher-teacher interactions that support learning and bring us closer to the elusive goal of clarifying the link between leadership and learning.

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Professional community among teachers, the subject of a number of recent major studies, is regarded as an ingredient that may contribute to the improvement of schools. The research reported in this article is grounded in the assumption that how teachers interact with each other outside of their classrooms may be critical to the effects of restructuring on students. The analysis focuses on the type of professional community that occurs within a school and investigates both the organizational factors that facilitate its development and its consequences for teachers’ sense of responsibility for student learning. The findings suggest that wide variation in professional community exists between schools, much of which is attributable to both structural features and human resources characteristics, as well as school level. Implications for current school reform efforts are discussed.

One assumption underlying accountability policies is that results from standardized tests and other sources will be used to make decisions about school and classroom practice. We explore this assumption using data from a longitudinal study of nine high schools nominated as leading practitioners of Continuous Improvement (CI) practices. We use the key beliefs underlying continuous improvement—derived from educational applications of Deming's TQM models—and organizational learning to analyze teachers’ responses to district expectations that they would use data to assess their own, their colleagues’, and their schools’ effectiveness and to make improvements. The findings suggest that most teachers are willing, but they have significant concerns about the kind of information that is available and how it is used to judge their own and colleagues’ performance. Our analysis reveals some cultural assumptions that are inconsistent with accountability policies and with theories of continuous improvement and organizational learning. We also identify barriers to use of testing and other data that help to account for the limited impacts.

Faculty members with industrial research support are at least as productive academically as those without such support and are more productive commercially. However, faculty members who have research relationships with industry are more likely to restrict their communication with colleagues, and high levels of industrial support may be associated with less academic activity without evidence of proportional increases in commercial productivity.