Effective schools require effective principals: a study of professional development for principals offers these findings about the qualities and impact of strong programs

Leadership, Sept-Oct, 2006 by Michelle LaPointe, Stephen H. Davis

At long last, scholars and policy makers have come to realize what most school administrators have known for years--that effective schools require both outstanding teachers and strong leaders.

Public demands for more effective schools have placed growing attention on the crucial role of school leaders--a professional group largely overlooked by the various educational reform movements of the past two decades. Evidence suggests that, second only to the influences of classroom instruction, school leadership strongly affects student learning (Leithwood, Seashore-Louis, Anderson and Wahlstrom, 2004).

Although there is considerable research about the characteristics of effective school leaders and the strategies principals can use to help manage increasingly diverse roles, comparatively little is known about how to design programs that can develop and sustain effective leadership practices.

Most scholars and practitioners today agree that traditional methods of preparing administrators fall short of providing the knowledge, skills and dispositions needed to lead schools and advance student learning in an increasingly complex and diverse society (Elmore, 1999; NCATE, 2000; Dilworth and Thomas, 2001; Peterson, 2002). Moreover, many of the methods used to prepare school leaders have surprisingly weak empirical support.

Internships and cohort groups

For example, while it is clear that clinical fieldwork is important for developing leadership skills, it is not clear what internship structures, activities and time frames are most effective in cultivating the capacity to lead. Also, the use of cohort groups has become quite popular. Yet, little is known about the relationship of cohort structure and function to the development of the leadership skills needed to promote powerful teaching and learning.

There are many other examples where the link between the practices and methods used to develop principals and the application of leadership skills to advance student learning lack strong empirical support (Kolb and Boyatzis, 1999; Daresh, 2001; Baugh, 2003).

However, the development of principals is a consequence of not just the attributes of individual preparation programs, but also the policy and fiscal support provided by state and local legislatures and regulatory agencies. Unfortunately, almost no research exists that examines in any depth how state funding and policy frameworks influence the quality of principal preparation programs and, ultimately, the ability of programs to produce leaders who can promote powerful teaching and learning.

The Stanford School Leadership Study

In an effort to increase the knowledge about professional development programs, the Wallace Foundation recently commissioned a study of innovative principal professional development programs and the policy and funding mechanisms that support them. In fall 2003, a team of researchers from the Stanford School of Education was awarded a Wallace grant and proceeded to design and embark upon a nationwide study of both the pre-and in-service professional development of school principals.

Our initial goal was to identify programs that contained many of the design and content elements described in the literature on effective principal development as well as programs that were most frequently mentioned by experts in the field. As per the requirements of the Wallace grant, we needed to provide a national perspective vs. a single state or region.

We quickly came to the realization that the number of reputable programs across the country was vast and virtually impossible to rank in terms of their effectiveness in producing strong instructional leaders (a critical loci of the Wallace grant). So, we searched not for the "best programs" in the country, but rather, for programs that had a strong reputation for developing instructional leaders and designed in ways that aligned closely with empirically supported principles of leadership development (i.e., program exemplars).

Our study was framed around several critical research questions (see box above). In the effort to answer these questions, we examined the literature on school leadership development, interviewed dozens of scholars and experts in the field of educational leadership, reviewed the curricula and structures of numerous pre- and in-service programs across the country, conducted surveys of school principals and teachers in several states, participated in extensive on-site visits of several promising programs and schools led by program graduates, and studied the policy and funding frameworks of the states where program exemplars were identified by the research team.

The research team collected both qualitative and survey data for the programs in the sample, and surveyed a national comparison sample of principals drawn from the membership of the National Association of Secondary School Principals and the National Association of Elementary School Principals.

We quickly discovered that on a national scale, the array of pre- and in-service programs was vast, inconsistent, inchoate and very difficult to generalize. The variations in program structure, content, methods, goals and support systems are immense. Nevertheless, we determined that most programs could fit under one of four general categories: university-based programs, district-initiated programs, third-party programs and partnership programs (Davis, Darling-Hammond, LaPointe, and Meyerson, 2005).