THE PRINCIPAL’S ROLE IN INCREASING TEACHER IMPLEMENTATION OF EFFECTIVE INSTRUCTIONAL PRACTICES IN MARION COUNTY, INDIANA: AN ANALYSIS OF KEY STRATEGIES FOR PRINCIPALS IN SUSTAINING SCHOOL CHANGE

Abstract

The attributes of an urban principal that make them successful against all odds, in spite of pressure, limited funding, and other dynamics of urban schools, are characteristics that hold true to those who focus their role as instructional leaders. Improvement has been traditionally more difficult to achieve in this day of high-stakes testing and accountability, especially in urban schools. Teachers’ perceptions of their principals influence the implementation of school improvement initiatives, which, in turn, influence student achievement and school improvement. This quantitative study examined principals’ and teachers’ perceptions of leadership actions that increase the implementation of school improvement initiatives in five school improvement categories. The five school improvement categories—school improvement, principal as instructional leader, creating a culture for learning, professional development and teacher supervision, and sustaining school improvement—were established as a result of discovered themes from current research on factors impacting school improvement. The sample comprised 206 teachers and 56 principals in five school districts in Marion County, Indiana. A Leadership Action Survey was created using an accumulation of existing surveys in order to measure the perceptions on the importance of leadership actions on school improvement by teachers and principals. A multivariate analysis of variance (MANOVA) was used to analyze the research questions. The study determined that there were minimal differences that exist between the perceptions of principals and teachers on the leadership actions that increase teachers’ implementation of school improvement initiates. When the teacher group was separated, the analysis found that there were significant differences among novice teachers, experienced teachers, and principals in their perceptions regarding the leadership actions that increase teachers’ implementation of school improvement initiatives in each of the five school improvement categories. In all school improvement categories, the principals rated the role of the principal significantly higher than the experienced teachers.