Looking for leadership: increasing principal presence through classroom walk-throughs and the resulting influence on principal-teacher professional relationships
Bibliographic record
Abstract
We live in paradoxical times. Governments have mandated accountability as the education agenda. The demands for improved student achievement are as real as the increasing pressure on schools systems and schools to deliver those results. Principals are required to be instructional leaders and champion accountability. At the same time, research indicates that, for improvement to succeed, principals and teachers need to work collegially on common goals. The Downey Three-Minute Classroom Walk-Through has been adopted by school districts in response to these dual pressures. As a strategy, it offers principals a short, focussed framework for observing classroom teaching and learning. Its reflective-conversation structure is designed to support collegial relationships. Its designers hoped that its practice would challenge, not reinforce, traditional hierarchical relationships and increase positive professional relationships between principals and teachers. However, for administrators using walk-throughs, design and delivery are not the same. In the study, I examined the factors that influenced the micropolitics of professional relationships in the two Southern Ontario school districts. The Downey approach, a district-mandated strategy designed to increase achievement, influenced professional relationships. Increased visibility allowed principals to develop a greater understanding of classroom instruction. Knowing what good teaching and learning looked like and finding evidence of it in their schools assisted principals in their role of instructional leader. All principals expressed comfort with the observation component. Their sense of self-efficacy and their teachers' appreciation of them as instructional leaders were increased. Data from the interviews indicate that the implementation of the Downey Three-Minute Classroom Walk-Through gave teachers and principals greater understanding of each other's role and the challenges each faced. Principals observed a range of teaching and had opportunities to give feedback. While increased and targeted classroom visits appeared to reinforce the self-efficacy of principals, walk-throughs did not appear to affect the self-efficacy of teachers. Teachers supported increased principal presence in classrooms; however, the predominant use of just the observation component meant that neither power hierarchies nor the underlying assumptions of the principal-teacher relationship were challenged. Principals did not understand the implications of collegiality, and walk-throughs were neither fully nor co-herently practiced, As the walk-through grows in popularity, additional research is required to explore its impact. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2016 APA, all rights reserved)
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 | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 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".