District Influence on Principals' Efficacy and Sensemaking in their School Improvement Efforts
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Part of a larger study of high-performing districts in Ontario, this mixed method (qualitative and quantitative) study identified school district actions perceived by principals to help them make sense of their leadership work and contribute to their sense of efficacy in carrying out that work. Qualitative data included interviews with 23 principals, 10 senior district leaders, and 5 trustees in two high-performing districts in the province. Narrative analysis was used to analyze these data. Quantitative data were provided by the responses of 1,563 principals and 250 senior district leaders to two forms of a survey which included sub-sets of questions about variables of special interest to this study. Descriptive statistics were used to summarize the survey results. Interview results showed that in the two study districts, each of 12 district actions framing the study were perceived to influence principals’ efficacy or principals’ sensemaking or both. Of those 12 district actions, principals in one of the two study districts identified 8 of the 12 district actions as especially influential in helping them to make sense of their work and to develop their sense of efficacy for carrying out that work; 10 of the 12 district actions were identified by principals in the second study district. Four of the 12 district actions were common across the responses of principals in both study districts including: networking interactions among principals; job-embedded and regional professional development opportunities; support from superintendents with the writing of school improvement plans; and emphasis and support with data interpretation and use for decision making processes. Except for one of these four district actions (use of evidence for decision making), survey results pointed to the same sets of district actions as particularly influential to both principals’ efficacy and sensemaking. This research adds to the understanding of what districts do that helps their school leaders work more effectively. Implications are identified for the actions of district leaders and for future research.
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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 | 0.005 | 0.012 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| 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".