Canada's Outstanding Principals: A Mixed-Methods Investigation of Leadership Development, Principal Efficacy, and Transformational Leadership
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This dissertation describes how Canada’s Outstanding Principals (COP) processes (i.e., engaging in the COP program, receiving COP recognition, continuing participation with COPA, engaging in technology-based networking, and navigating nomination process) enhanced the leadership capacities of COP recipients, and how COP, as a leadership development program, strengthened the relationship between transformational leadership and principal efficacy. An exploratory analysis of collective principal efficacy was also presented. Over and above an existing skill set, well-designed leadership development programs require a multi-year commitment integrating leadership wisdom from education and non-education sectors. When core transformational practices were combined, the COP processes of engaging in the COP program, receiving COP recognition, and continuing participation with COPA were most influential, while engaging in technology-based networking and navigating the nomination process were least influential. COP met the six leadership development program elements identified in the literature review as being foundational to a well-designed leadership development program. All six elements were necessary to enhance principal leadership capacity. When evidence relating to influential leadership development experiences and elements of well-designed leadership development programs were combined, purposeful, reciprocal, and iterative peer networking appeared to be the most influential leadership development program element. Principal efficacy was identified as a prerequisite for transformational leadership with the core transformational leadership practice of developing people driving the other core transformational leadership practices. Overall, COP processes moderately improved COP recipient ability to demonstrate core transformational leadership practices. The concepts of transformational leadership and principal efficacy, and their impact on student achievement, are demonstrated as important in the research literature. This dissertation contributed to the research literature by applying these concepts to a leadership development program, establishing that developing leaders with abilities as transformational leaders, and tapping into principal efficacy, were insightful elements of leadership development. Further research was suggested to consolidate understanding of the collective principal efficacy concept, and how to foster collective principal efficacy when developing a network of principals with high principal efficacy. Recommendations for leaders, program developers, and policymakers are made.
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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 | 0.017 | 0.020 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.010 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| 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".