With and For All: Middle School Principal Instructional Leadership

Lawmakers have created federal policies that position and provide funding for the development of principals as instructional leaders and the creation of evaluation systems that measure principal effectiveness based on the results of student achievement data from state and federal accountability measures. Despite implementation of new standards, data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress indicates that student achievement has not statistically significantly changed since 2009 for eighth grade students. Furthermore, research has shown that middle school is a critical time in a student’s academic journey and that middle school achievement is predictive of high school completion and readiness for college. Though research has tied principal instructional leadership to student achievement, a gap remains in our understanding of the “black box” of principal instructional leadership, particularly at the middle school level.

This basic interpretive qualitative study provided voice to nine middle school principals across three districts to share their experiences, in their own words, about how each principal conceptualizes and describes his or her role as an instructional leader and how they utilize formal and informal leaders to provide instructional leadership to teachers across various content areas. Principals in this study participated in semi-structured interviews with three key findings emerging from data analysis: (1) principals utilize strategic processes in their role as instructional leaders to construct a vision for their schools, (2) principals view themselves as instructional experts who organize formal and informal leaders to support with content expertise, and (3) principals utilize teachers to enact leadership roles across the school within established structures to move the work of their school forward.