Leading learning: theorizing principals’ support for teacher PD in Ontario

Abstract

This paper describes and theorizes principals’ support for teacher professional development (‘PD’) during a time of strong provincial pressure for an increased focus upon literacy, numeracy, and improvements in standardized test scores in elementary schools in Ontario, Canada. The paper draws upon semi‐structured interviews with 12 principals in one school district to reveal tensions between principals’ support for professional development associated with these provincial emphases, and advocacy for professional development relevant to the specific needs of their school sites. To explore these competing priorities, the paper draws upon Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of the social world as comprising identifiable and contested social ‘fields’, each containing individuals and groups with particular and competing socially‐inscribed dispositions, or ‘habitus’. At the same time, the paper uses principals’ responses to validate and extend normative understandings of ‘leadership habitus’. While provincial pressures are revealed as having a significant impact upon principals’ habitus, an argument is made that the capacity to take local context into account needs to be foregrounded more strongly in current normative conceptions of leadership habitus.