Conceptualizing Alberta District Leadership Practices: A Cross-Case Analysis

Abstract

We interviewed 45 district-level staff, principals, and trustees in two high-performing and one rapidly improving Alberta school districts. We asked interviewees to detail the what and the how of key leadership practices to promote and sustain student achievement and how they had changed over the last five to ten years. The cross-case findings are clustered around four practices that respondents described and strongly endorsed: (1) collaboration between school- and district-level leadership in setting the direction in leadership for learning; (2) development of a shared expertise in the uses of evidence about student learning; (3) provision of professional development that is job-embedded and based on school needs; and (4) alignment of an array of practices and structures to support student learning.

Notes

1. Many of these practices are central to CASS’s leadership dimensions framework and bear similar, but not identical, characteristics to those used in Ontario’s Leadership Framework (Leithwood, 2012), the latter developed under the auspices of the Leadership Development Branch of Ontario’s Ministry of Education. Dr. Leithwood’s input in the framing of both these documents was extensive. We made slight adjustments to the interview protocol developed by Leithwood to fit the Alberta context but our aim was to follow that protocol as closely as possible in order to allow for comparison with the three Ontario cases studied by Leithwood.

2. For over a decade the Alberta Initiative for School Improvement provided substantial funding to local districts and participating schools to support locally-defined and managed school improvement projects.