Leadership Supports for First-time Vice-principals: Coaching as a Form of Professional Learning
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The purpose of this research was to learn about how coaching serves as a form of professional learning for newly-appointed vice-principals. This study is intended to add to our understanding of the ways in which coaching supports the professional learning of vice-principals in a context where their role is ill-defined and determined by their principal. A qualitative research approach was used which included personal interviews with fourteen first-time elementary vice-principals in five Ontario school districts. The study was based on the following research question: How does the coaching experience support the professional learning of first-time school administrators?\nThe participants reported positive feelings about their coaching experiences. Specifically, they described that they appreciated the confidential and non-evaluative nature of the coaching relationship, that the focus was on their individual learning needs, and that the coaching provided opportunities to engage in reflective thinking. In terms of their learning, the participants reported that through coaching they built confidence, gained knowledge about both the managerial and leadership aspects of school leader roles, and that they learned about themselves and their own well-being in the process. Several challenges were reported. These included a desire for increased frequency of scheduled coaching sessions while maintaining a focus on learning during the sessions, and financial constraints for those who needed to be released from teaching responsibilities in order to participate in coaching. Based on their experiences, the participants described the vice-principal role as being determined by the principal, offering limited opportunity to exercise their own leadership, expecting them to follow decisions made by the principal, and serving to prepare them for the principalship. \nThe thesis concludes that coaching for newly-appointed elementary vice-principals is a valuable experience because it serves as personalized professional learning that engages participants in reflective thought. The lack of clarity about the vice-principal role creates a situation where vice-principals understand their role principally through their experiences of it, not through research, policy, or training. As a result, each vice-principal has unique learning needs based on their experience of the role thus they benefit when their learning is personalized.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.008 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.008 | 0.005 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".