District Leaders Research Articles

Keep calm—this is a judgment-free zone: teacher perceptions about classroom intervisitations

PurposeThis article aims to consider teacher's views about intervisitations regarding its application and its usefulness as a community-enhancer. Many educators venture into the world of teaching because they love learning and value learning from their peers (rather than merely from text or administrators); however, teacher reservations or hesitations towards the practice of engaging in intervisitations do exist and can serve as an obstacle.Design/methodology/approachThe findings reported in this study resulted from the analysis of two teacher's perspectives towards classroom intervisitations. The subset of data presented in this study resulted from the surveys and semi-structured interviews that were conducted. Qualitative methodology was used to address the research question as it allows for a greater exploration, description and ideally the emotions of participants/teachers. The coding process consisted of open coding, which then led to axial coding and the elevation of codes to themes.FindingsIn this study, teacher buy-in would be enhanced through the protocol feeling more personalized, less-dictated and more flexible in its execution, especially through the support of administrators and district leaders. In addition, teacher mindsets and perceptions also need some reshifting and should be part of the professional development process involving intervisitation roll-outs as any hesitations/limitations/and lack of willingness need to be honed in on and prioritized. Lastly, limiting teachers from an appropriate amount of time to complete such work may also encourage shallow collaboration among teachers instead of in-depth reflexive practice. By prioritizing intervisitations and/or inter-teacher collaboration in the building and allowing teachers to embark on professional development sessions with each other as a means of growing as a teacher and community, all will flourish.Originality/valueThrough examining the narratives of two educators, it was found that teacher willingness to partake in intervisitations is dependent on the school climate, particularly with regards to trust and a yearn-to-learn among inter-school peers and administrators. In addition, providing ample time and educating teachers on the benefits of such practices enhances one's wanting to independently venture into such work.

The Effect of Changes in the Performance of the Village Head on the Progress of the Unitary Village Community

Changes in leadership within a certain period are common in Indonesia, be it state, regional, district and village leaders. A village is led by a village head with the highest position who takes part in changing a village, if the performance of the village head is good it will be good and the village he leads will also develop. This study aims to measure the effect of changes in the performance of the new village head on the progress of the community in the unitary village. The method used in this research is the method of observation, as well as interviews with the community and village heads to find out what policies and performance will be carried out by the new village head. Of course, this is something that is highly expected and desired by the entire unitary village community, with the change of the new village head, of course there must be better performance to lead the unitary village community to progress.

Design-based Professional Learning: A Promising Approach to Continuous Professional Learning

Collaborative professionalism engages teachers and other educators in the processes of documenting and presenting evidence arising from their practice, engaging in deep and demanding dialogue with colleagues, seeking and receiving constructive and productive feedback, and engaging in continuous collaborative inquiry. A design orientation that engages educators in such a process is design-based professional learning. While the overall design of the professional learning is consistent across contexts, three key features are unique to each design—situativity, the cyclical nature of learning and change, and agency. These three features are used to describe two cases of design-based professional learning in two different contexts. Based on 715 teachers, and school and district leaders’ learning engaged in design-based professional learning, we conclude that design-based professional learning provides a promising approach to professional learning.

Race-gender D/Discourses in Mathematics Education: (Re)-Producing Inequitable Participation Patterns Across a Diverse, Instructionally-Advanced Urban District

This paper uses quantitative analytics to study talk-based participation in 100 mathematics classrooms across one racially diverse urban school district in the USA. Using the EQUIP observation tool and hierarchical linear modeling, we characterize the quantity and quality of participation for students across 3025 coded turns, by race and gender. We found that in general, boys participated significantly more than girls. We also found that Latinx and Asian/Pacific Islander students had significantly fewer turns than Black and White students. To interpret these findings in context, we analyzed interviews from 29 district leaders using a poststructural framework organized around D/discourse.

Opportunities for Policy Implementation and Advocacy

Physical activity (PA) policies have the potential to ensure adequate opportunities for children to develop PA behaviors for a lifetime. Examples include mandating that schools provide recess and physical education for a specified amount of time per week; ensuring that physical education teachers are licensed; providing activity breaks in academic classrooms; and mandating the implementation of policies at federal, state, and local levels. Collectively, these policies help to promote and support Comprehensive School Physical Activity Programs (CSPAP). However, there is little guidance on how PA policies can be implemented at the school and district level, limiting their impact on promoting student behaviors. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to provide an overview of research conducted on CSPAP policy development, adoption, and implementation and how best to support local implementation efforts in schools to increase PA and its impact on children’s health. We provide pragmatic recommendations for how school and district leadership can use implementation science principles to assess current policy implementation and advocate for more comprehensive PA policies which support systems change.

Resign or carry-on? District and principal leadership as drivers of change in teacher turnover intentions during the COVID-19 crisis: A latent growth model examination.

During the COVID‐19 pandemic, teachers in the United States, an already at‐risk occupation group, experienced new work‐related stressors, safety concerns, and work‐life challenges, magnifying on‐going retention concerns. Integrating the crisis management literature with the unfolding model of turnover, we theorize that leader actions trigger initial employee responses but also set the stage for on‐going crisis response that influence changes in teachers' turnover intentions. We apply latent growth curve modelling to test our hypotheses based on a sample of 617 K‐12 teachers using nine waves of data, including a baseline survey at the start of the 2020–2021 school year and eight follow‐up surveys (2‐week lags) through the Fall 2020 semester. In terms of overall adaptation, teachers on average, experienced an increase in work‐life balance and a decrease in turnover intentions over the course of the semester. Results also suggest that district and school leadership provide unique and complementary resources, but leader behaviours that shape initial crisis responses do not similarly affect employee responses during crisis, contrary to theory. Instead, teachers' adaptive crisis response trajectories were triggered by continued resource provision over the semester; increasing provision of valued resources (i.e., continued refinement of safety practices) and improvements in work‐life balance prevented turnover intentions from spiralling throughout the crisis. Crisis management theory and research should continue to incorporate temporal dynamics and identify factors that contribute to crisis response trajectories, using designs and analyses that allow for examination as crises unfold in real time.

Digital divides in access and use in literacy instruction in rural high schools

• Literacy instruction in rural schools varies widely in terms of technology use and access. • Large-scale quantitative studies fail to capture differences between local contexts. • Teacher technology training is essential but difficult to implement in rural schools. This article presents institutional case studies of technology use in language and literacy instruction at two rural high schools based on almost two months of classroom observations as well as interviews with teachers, administrators, and students. The first school presented faced a number of funding issues and clearly lacked in terms of access—the teachers regularly expressed frustration with district leadership and lamented their ability to have students do more computer-based literacy work. The second school presented had a very different issue—through a series of grants, they had secured computers for every student in their English classes but teachers had varying level of training on how to incorporate them in learning and consequently, the computers were often used in reductive ways. This research provides a perspective that shows the limitations of large-scale comparisons, emphasizing how local contextual factors (such as school leadership and teacher training) can shape both access and use. It also shows how access is only one piece of the picture—without sufficient teacher training and support, available technology may help perpetuate reductive educational practices in language and literacy instruction .

Identification of the communication time demands of educational leaders

Email has become a prominent communication tool for principals. Although principals have reported benefits of communicating via email, they have also indicated that it has intensified their workload. Specifically, principals have indicated that they receive a large volume of email, which contributes to extending and fragmenting their workdays. From actual email records, this study examined how email contributed to principal time demands and time use. Results indicated that the sample of principals received a substantial amount of email, which occurred during an extensive portion of the day, and also intensified during instructional hours. The comparisons of the timing of email activity revealed that principals experienced similar time demands from email, but used their time differently to address the demands. In addition, the email activities of principals exhibited descriptive differences from school district leaders. The findings indicated the need for more studies of principals’ email activities and the time demands of principals, as well as suggested the need for principal preparation programs to provide specific training related to email and other such information technology.

The impacts of COVID-19 on K-8 science teaching and teachers

Some science education researchers have presented either isolated findings on specific points in time during the pandemic or non-empirical insights or suggestions for how teachers, district leaders, policymakers, and others should take up the learnings from the pandemic to move science education forward. However, there are few studies published to date that provide robust and longitudinal empirical data on what science instruction looked like throughout the pandemic and the magnitude of the impacts of the pandemic on science instruction when compared to pre-pandemic science teaching and learning. We conducted a primarily survey-based study on science instruction and enactment of the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) in K-8 classrooms throughout the COVID-19 pandemic. This analysis also incorporates a longitudinal dataset from grade 6–8 teachers across California on their NGSS instruction prior to and throughout the first year of the pandemic, providing insight on instruction over multiple years before and throughout distance learning. Our findings highlight the challenges that teachers and students faced during the pandemic, as well as the significant impacts that distance learning appeared to have on science instruction and teachers’ ability to provide NGSS-aligned instruction. However, we also found that a year after the initial school closures, teachers’ science instruction began to show improvements both in the frequency of science instruction (how often they were able to provide science instruction through distance learning) and the quality of science instruction (how often teachers were able to provide instruction that was aligned with the goals of the NGSS). Implications of this work are far reaching and may impact teachers, students, administrators, policymakers, professional learning providers, and curriculum developers regardless of whether science instruction occurs through distance learning or in-person moving forward.

Ci3T Leadership Team Members’ Perceived Facilitators and Barriers to Implementation

In this qualitative study we sought to understand the experiences of K-12 school personnel serving on Comprehensive, Integrated, Three-Tiered (Ci3T) leadership teams. We conducted 22 semi-structured interviews and five focus groups across three states and five school districts to determine team members’ perceptions regarding facilitators and barriers to Ci3T implementation. We determined from common themes three priority areas for continued professional learning to support Ci3T implementation: (a) Ci3T onboarding and training for new team members, (b) communicating the vision of Ci3T to foster buy-in across stakeholders, and (c) providing Ci3T professional learning to faculty and staff. We discussed findings in terms of possible benefits to school leadership teams working within integrated tiered models and how results of this study may inform the creation of learning modules to support district and Ci3T leadership team members. We discuss limitations with future directions.

Tula Regional Party School – a source of leadership (1943–1960)

On the basis of the documents of Tula Regional Party School, the resolutions of Tula Regional Party Committee Bureau concerning its work and cadre statistics the school's activity in training and retraining the leading personnel in 1943-1960 is analysed. The dependence of dynamics of school trainees and the structure of their teaching load on the regional economy, its management practice and the personnel resources of party and Soviet bodies is shown. The quantitative and qualitative lack of investments, especially in agriculture, and the shortage of managerial specialists led to the concentration of the school up to the mid 1950s on the training of district managers with an emphasis on the improvement of their use of administrative resources. The growth of the scale of the regional economy, the complexity of its sectoral structure made it necessary for the regional leadership to gradually abandon emergency management as a universal method of leadership. In combination with the formation of a sufficient cadre of specialists with higher education for the apparatus of Party and Soviet bodies from the late 1950s; this made the main task of the regional party school to improve the general educational level and competency in economic issues of grassroots leaders. At the same time, the political training of district leaders moved to the Higher Party School under the Communist Party's Central Committee, and the starting point of their careers became higher education.

Public School Superintendent Sagacity: A Foundation for Financial Leadership

In an era of accountability, competition for student enrollment, and the necessity to balance district budgets, district leaders are seeking to thrive despite these legitimate stressors. Among the responsibilities of a superintendent, financial leadership balanced with instructional leadership is critical to the success of a school district and the leader. This study sought to explore how superintendents construct their financial leadership savvy and develop financial sagacity in a context where they are under stressful and ever-changing conditions. Findings from this study indicate that superintendents rely primarily on professional networks to inform their decision making and that there is a significant relationship between job experience and stress related to school finances. Researchers also identified implications for superintendents related to level of stress, the importance of professional networks and mentoring, and the essence of creative strategies aligned to financial decision making for superintendents.

Subverting Whiteness and Amplifying Anti-Racisms: Mid-Level District Leadership for Racial Justice

This counternarrative study positions two distinct bodies of literature in conversation: mid-level district leadership in the literature on educational change and anti-racist approaches to leadership framed through Critical Race Theory and Critical Whiteness Studies. Interviews with twelve, mid-level district leaders committed to anti-racism in Ontario, Canada, reveal fundamental differences in leaders’ knowledges and capacities compared to those identified in the literature on educational change and promoted in the corresponding leadership frameworks in Ontario. In centering power, racialization, and whiteness as a logic of oppression, anti-racist approaches to leadership fundamentally reconstitute conceptions and enactments of leadership. Findings speak to the importance of knowledge(s) about race and racialization, racism and intersecting oppressions, and how whiteness subverts anti-racist efforts. Findings also speak to developing capacities such as: visioning that both owns historical injustices and imagines future possibilities; organizing and collectivizing as a means of power sharing and decentering the individual leader; facilitating difficult learning in the face of racist resistance and multiple frameworks; securing accountability for rights by building informal accountability structures while advocating for formal ones; aligning resources and creating structures in support of students from historically oppressed communities; and, sustaining the self in the face of the impending harm in doing this work. With a focus on whiteness, this study invites scholars and practitioners to turn the gaze upward and consider what might need to be undone and unlearned from multiple and intersecting systems of oppression, what the authors refer to as unleading.

Facilitators and barriers to implementation of integrated community case management of childhood illness: a qualitative case study of Kapiri Mposhi District

BackgroundZambia adopted the Integrated Community Case Management (ICCM) of childhood illness strategy in May 2010, targeting populations in rural communities and hard-to-reach areas. However, evidence suggests that ICCM implementation in local health systems has been suboptimal. This study sought to explore facilitators and barriers to implementation of ICCM in the health system in Kapiri Mposhi District, Zambia.MethodsData were gathered through 19 key informant interviews with district health managers, ICCM supervisors, health facility managers, and district health co-operating partners. The study was conducted in Kapiri Mposhi district, Zambia. Interviews were translated and transcribed verbatim. Data were were analyzed using thematic analysis in NVivo 11(QSR International).ResultsFacilitators to implementation of ICCM consisted of community involvement and support for the program, active community case detection and timeliness of health services, the program was not considered a significant shift from other community-based health interventions, district leadership and ownership of the program, availability of national and district-level policies supporting ICCM and engagement of district co-operating partners. Program incompatibility with some socio-cultural and religious cotexts, stock-out of prerequisite drugs and supplies, staff reshuffle and redeployment, inadequate supervision of health facilities, and nonpayment of community health worker incentives inhibited implementation of ICCM.ConclusionThe study findings highlight key faciliators and barriers that should be considered by policy-makers, district health managers, ICCM supervisors, health facility managers, and co-operating partners, in designing context-specific strategies, to ensure successful implementation of ICCM in local health systems.

A Better EdD by Design: An Inquiry-Focused, Equity-Based Dissertation to Change Leadership Practice

In this study, we explored how a reimagined EdD supports leaders to develop the knowledge, skills, and dispositions necessary for effective school and district leadership. We analyzed the usefulness of inquiry-focused, equity-based participatory action research (PAR) in EdD dissertations by using case study methodology to analyze four graduates during and after the EdD program. The findings indicate participants successfully implemented PAR studies while simultaneously bolstering their leadership capacity. Findings have practical use for (1) EdD graduates as they continue to use the PAR methodology in their current work and communities and (2) leadership programs that choose to use PAR as a methodology for scholarly practitioners.

PK–12 District Leadership for Equity: An Exploration of Director Role Configurations and Vulnerabilities

PK–12 District Leadership for Equity: An Exploration of Director Role Configurations and Vulnerabilities

Solving for X: Constructing Algebra and Algebra Policy During a Time of Change

The year students take Algebra I historically determines how far they progress in secondary mathematics, creating complex equity issues around access to this course. By examining a case study of one large, urban school district adjusting to the Common Core State Standards in Mathematics (CCSS-M), we demonstrate how district leaders’ interactions, in combination with their organizational and institutional environments, led to an overhaul of the secondary mathematics course pathway, ending in detracked middle school mathematics. We find that district leaders’ deliberations of mathematics policy were constrained by organizational concerns around pedagogy, equity, logistics, and politics. In other words, the disruption created by the CCSS-M was limited by extant organizational priorities. This study has potential implications for theorizing disruptions and for better understanding equity-oriented mathematics policy and practice.

Translating Multisectoral Nutrition Policy into Community Practice: Participation of Nutrition Officers in Tanzania Fosters Effective Collaborative Strategies to Improve Child Nutrition

ABSTRACTBackgroundGlobally, multisectoral coordination for nutrition is needed to tackle multiple determinants of undernutrition and address unacceptably high rates of stunting in young children. Tanzania has strong national policies and implementation plans to strengthen multisectoral nutrition (MSN) governance, yet local actors must transcend sector silos to fully implement MSN actions in communities.ObjectivesWe engaged with Nutrition Officers in Regional Secretariats and District Councils to explore strategies, barriers, and facilitators for creating novel “MSN action teams.”MethodsAn initial “Learning Exchange” workshop gathered input from nutrition staff in 5 regions and invited their participation in mentoring and supporting MSN collaboration. Regional Nutrition Officers piloted action teams in their districts, supporting District Nutrition Officers to create teams of 3–4 officers from relevant sectors (agriculture, community development, health, education) to plan and implement community-based activities consistent with sector priorities and national policy. To learn from stakeholder experiences, longitudinal data were collected through individual semistructured interviews and documentation of activities; 27 officers were interviewed 1–4 times over 14 mo.ResultsFour districts successfully created action teams that bridged communication gaps between administrators and implementors; made progress on advocacy, collaboration, and budgeting for nutrition; and initiated MSN implementation in communities. Participants identified strategies to overcome challenges to cross-sector collaboration including heavy workloads and limited resources and supervisor buy-in. Based on their experiences and innovations in creating MSN action teams, stakeholders shared valuable recommendations for peer learning across sectors to scale up MSN collaboration. Officers’ presentation of insights to regional and district leaders buoyed interest in MSN action teams as a feasible and acceptable approach to strengthen local governance and implementation to improve child nutrition.ConclusionsExperience-based input from government officers engaged in novel community and intersectoral collaborations provided actionable guidance for putting national MSN policy into practice and leveraging the capacity of implementation staff.

Inclusive Leadership in Times of COVID-19 Crisis: The Role of District and School Leaders in Fostering School Sense-Making Processes within a National Inclusion and Integration Reform

ABSTRACT COVID-19 requires educational leaders to collectively make sense of their inclusive practices. This qualitative study explores how COVID-19 crisis shaped Israeli superintendents’ and principals’ role in fostering school sense-making processes during a reform based on Amendment No. 11 to the Special Education Law. Data were collected with 22 Jewish and Arab district and school leaders via Zoom interviews. Data analysis yielded three major themes: (1) Developing a shared vision and direction; (2) Building school capacity for inclusion: (a) nurturing a culture of collective responsibility (b) maintaining mental-resilience skills and well-being; and (3) Fostering school collaboration and trust with stakeholders.

State leadership to strengthen family engagement programs

The Ohio Statewide Family Engagement Center (OhSFEC) is implementing a comprehensive, scalable approach to enact state policy for family and school engagement at local levels. Joyce Epstein and Barbara Boone report how OhSFEC’s research-based design, implementation, and evaluation of a leadership ladder has enabled state leaders to support regional, district, and school leaders as they organize and implement family engagement programs linked to schoolwide goals for student learning and development. Initial evaluation of the program shows that the policies and practices are being applied in schools, and families are seeing improvement in their interactions with schools.