Supervising school leaders in a rapidly changing world

Understanding District Support for Leader Development and Success in the Accountability Era: A Review of the Literature Using Social-Cognitive Theories of Motivation

“…Authentic learning opportunities, like problem-based learning and on-the-job expert coaching/mentoring, are also examples of meaningful principal development activities that can be coordinated by school districts (Darling-Hammond et al, 2007; Stucher et al, 2017). Though evidence is still emerging, early research suggests that principal supervisors can play a critical role in development, particularly in the areas of racial equity (Rigby et al, 2019) and instructional improvement (Honig, 2012; Honig & Rainey, 2019; Thessin & Louis, 2019). Furthermore, at least one study has pointed to a specific area where principals might benefit from additional training and support to foster competence—using data to assess teacher effectiveness and to make hiring decisions (Cannata et al, 2017).…”

“…Furthermore, the advent of intermediary principal supervisory roles has precipitated increased study of these positions as potentially important vehicles for building principal efficacy as instructional leaders (Honig & Rainey, 2019; Thessin & Louis, 2019). In a study of three districts, Honig (2012) found that high variation in Instructional Leadership Director practices with respect to self-efficacy emphasized the importance of several key practices: (a) the degree to which principal supervisors worked to inculcate in principals the value of principal instructional leadership; (b) the use of modeling and its role in forging meaningful, productive relationships with principals; and (c) the use of tools as a basis for having challenging conversations and serving as information “brokers” (i.e., providing principals with connections to external resources).…”

“…Principals, by the very nature of their positions, are isolated from important others upon which they could lean for information, knowledge and skills, or collegial/moral support. One way that districts can support relatedness is through collaborative activities whereby individuals feel connected to one another through shared goals, efforts, and activities (Thessin & Louis, 2019). There is a moderate-to-strong level of evidentiary support for this particular area of district support for leader development—some of which has been covered in the previous sections.…”

The role of social media as an electronic communication media in supporting leadership supervision in high schools

“…Given the nature of the study in terms of its goals, curriculum and society, a questionnaire was built to collect information and data related to this study by reviewing previous studies related to the axes of the questionnaire whereby the researcher did not find direct studies to measure integrated leadership, except for general studies that dealt with integrated supervision, such as Al Qutami's (1) . The goal of the questionnaire was determined to build a proposed vision for developing a model for integrated school leadership, and the areas of measuring the questionnaire were determined by the reality, Responses to the clauses were graded using the five-step scale for the responses of the study sample individuals to the score clauses (applicability/approval of requirements/availability of constraints) (strongly agree -agree -neutral -do not agreestrongly disagree), and the instructions of the study tool were formulated.…”

“…The supervision of the leadership of school in the various education departments plays 25 a major role in improving school performance. The development of information, com-26 munication, and technology has produced supervisory models called electronic super-27 vision, which is also known as integrated supervision (1) .…”