Middle School Principals’ Understandings and Practices of Instructional Leadership
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The purpose of this case study was to gain insight into how experienced middle school principals understand the concept of instructional leadership and, further, perceive their enactments of instructional leadership to build the instructional capacity of the teachers in their schools. Research into instructional leadership indicates that school principals contribute indirectly to school effectiveness and student achievement through actions (practices) that influence the type and quality of instruction in schools and classrooms; however, there is limited research on this topic that is specific to leadership in middle schools. The study used qualitative case study methodology involving semi-structured interviews with five experienced middle school principals, all from a large, urban public school district in Alberta. The findings of this inquiry revealed six key themes. Middle school principals in this study: (a) have a strong theoretical understanding of leadership for learning, (b) define their practices of instructional leadership through shared leadership, PLC structures, and a focus on relationships, (c) perceive their practices of instructional leadership to include developing leadership capacity of others, (d) share beliefs and understandings, and enact practices of instructional leadership that are strongly influenced by a specific body of leadership literature that is promoted through district-led professional learning initiatives, (e) believe there are contextual differences that impact not just their leadership generally, but their instructional leadership, and (f) have a sophisticated theoretical understanding of instructional leadership and leadership for learning; however, they struggle to provide evidence of how their practices impact teachers’ instructional capacity and student learning. The findings of my study contribute to the growing body of knowledge related to instructional leadership, especially as it focuses on middle schools.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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 | 0.005 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.010 | 0.007 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| 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 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".