Meetings: school leadership infrastructure that creates sense

Abstract

ABSTRACT Staff meetings and central office meetings of the school principal or principal meetings are noted across literature, considered necessary and occasionally frustrating, and yet they remain a relatively overlooked phenomenon in educational leadership scholarship. The question guiding this article is: Are principal meetings necessary and, if so, what purpose(s) do they serve? To answer this question, principal meetings are conceptualized as interconnected sensemaking episodes to analyze evidence from a five-month mini-ethnographic case study of the meetings of two elementary school principals in India. Findings show that principal meetings are necessary for providing focus and coherence to the performance of administrative responsibilities. Findings shed light on how elements such as ambiguity-clarification and task-repetitions may be a doubled-edged sword that makes meetings effective but also contributes to frustration and boredom. Principal meetings highlight that leadership effectiveness must be tied to the context and physical presence shapes meaning-making. Principal meetings are non-trivial sensemaking nodes of leadership infrastructure encouraging reciprocity in thought but may also create a reality that prioritizes administration over instructional improvement. Implications include considering meetings less as tools in need of improvement and more as conceptual and analytical phenomena to study and nuance educational leadership practice.