Senior Leaders’ Perceptions about Preparing and Developing Alberta’s Principals as Instructional and Learning Leaders
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The purpose of this case study is to gain a deeper understanding of senior, district-level leaders’ perceptions regarding school and district-level leadership practices that prepare and develop principals as instructional and learning leaders in Alberta urban school districts. Recognizing a heightened focus on system and school leadership directed by Alberta’s practice standard and linked to student outcomes, this inquiry explores how senior leaders prepare, develop, and support principals as instructional and learning leaders, and in what ways senior leaders themselves are supported and challenged in this work. In this case study, data were generated through policy document reviews and semi-structured interviews with seven senior leaders in three Alberta urban school authorities. Through a qualitative coding process, six themes emerged indicating that system leaders (a) understand their shifting role in supporting principals as instructional and learning leaders; (b) build principal capacity through mentoring, modelling, supervising, and evaluating; (c) align practices, policies, and procedures with system wide district learning priorities; (d) promote district-led principal preparation and development programs; (e) equip themselves and each other as instructional-learning leaders to prepare and develop principals; and (f) ensure successes and navigate challenges in preparing and developing principal instructional-learning leaders. With limited research on how system leaders prepare, develop, and support principals as instructional and learning leaders, this study makes a much needed contribution. Knowledge gained from this research may support system and school instructional and learning leadership practices through sustained, effective principal preparation and development. Included are recommendations to educational leaders, post-secondary institutions, and policy makers for the practical implementation of principal preparation and development that has the potential to improve quality teaching and student learning.
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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 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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".