Bibliographic record
Abstract
Despite growing consensus that educational reform has changed the nature of school leadership, the contemporary literature provides limited insight into how educational change impacts the identity of those who are centrally involved. Although the principal is deemed to be a critical lynch-pin in school improvement, relatively few studies seek the informative voices of principals to understand the identities assumed as principals engage in change processes, and how principals address consonance and dissonance between their identities and internal and external demands. In this study, interpretive approaches were used to explore the relationship between principal identity and educational change. I used purposeful sampling to select six principals within central Alberta. Multiple individual interviews were conducted with each principal. Additionally, I recorded notes in my researcher’s journal which also served as a record of my thinking as the study unfolded and as an additional data source. Data analysis involved identifying patterns and themes pertinent to the research questions. Micropolitical analysis suggested that the nature and degree of change was influenced by the four identities principals assumed as they engaged in educational change: (a) organizational architect (visionary and analyst sub-identities), (b) mediator (disseminator, meaning maker, and problem solver sub-identities), (c) awakener (teacher and learner sub-identities), and (d) protector (caregiver and advocate sub-identities). A degree of overlap and reciprocity, as well as competition, between identities and sub-identities existed. Principals’ assumed identities were derived from access to sources of organizational power. Principals constructed their own understandings and responses to change by assimilating, accommodating (including symbolic accommodation and compromise), or resisting (through evidence-based argument, avoidance, and opposition) new ideas or approaches. Although principals often felt at odds with the prevailing discourses of educational change, they both consciously and inadvertently reinforced dominant ideologies. Expectations for legitimacy and cohesion preoccupied principals’ thinking and influenced identity salience. Principals’ identities and responses impacted the potential for change. My key recommendation is that principals need to consider how their identities, positional power, and responses to change shape the nature and extent of educational change. I conclude with further questions and directions for practice, policy, and research.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
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 teacher head, 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".