Taking a Distributed Perspective to the School Principal's Workday

Abstract

Focusing on the school principal's day-to-day work, we examine who leads curriculum and instruction- and administration-related activities when the school principal is not leading but participating in the activity. We also explore the prevalence of coperformance of management and leadership activities in the school principal's workday. Looking across a range of administration-related and curriculum and instruction-related activities school principals participate in, we show that who takes responsibility for leading and managing the schoolhouse varies considerably from activity to activity and from one school to the next.

Acknowledgments

An earlier draft of this article was presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Educational Research Association, San Francisco, April 7–11, 2006. Work on this article was supported by the National Institute for School Leadership Evaluation Study funded by the Institute for Education Sciences (Grant # R305E040085) and the Distributed Leadership Studies funded by the National Science Foundation (RETA Grant # EHR–0412510).

Notes

¹Cloverville is a pseudonym, as are all other names used in the article to refer to participants, their schools, and their town.

²Response rates were calculated for principals who participated for a majority (i.e., 4 days) of the sampling period. Nonresponses seem to have occurred mostly after the principals' school days had ended, when the principals were not participating in school-related activities (e.g., on their lunch breaks), or when they were in meetings where they presumably could not be interrupted. The percentage of beeps where there was no response is fairly constant at around 30% between the hours of 9 a.m. and 3 p.m. The earlier the hour before 9 a.m., or the later the hour after 3 p.m., the higher was the nonresponse rate. We are exploring the nonresponse issue in ongoing work.