The ultimate goal of an education system is to ensure students receive a quality education that prepares them for real-world experiences and opportunities beyond their K-12 education. However, it is the responsibility of the building-level leaders or principals to ensure teachers are receiving the proper professional development that can be used…

Customary practice in schools is that educators work in silos, often neglecting the opportunity to collaborate with colleagues to truly meet all students' needs. As students transition from middle school to high school, a clear bridging process is vital to set students up for success. Conventional parameters will need to be dismantled, and…

Leadership coaching has been a means to build the capacity of leaders within the business community for numerous years (Bono et al., 2009). Over the last 10 years, leadership coaching has become an avenue to support professional development and capacity building for school leaders. Although the coaching concept is not new to the education field,…

Headship (School Principal) is a challenging role within a complex and ever-changing policy climate. This article explores the factors which influence headteacher resilience and their mental health. Existing research focuses on teacher resilience but there is a paucity of literature exploring the factors which influence headteacher resilience.…

Traditional teacher evaluations -- full-lesson observations, write-ups, and debriefs -- are time-consuming and largely ineffective. As a principal, Kim Marshall found that mini-observations -- short, frequent, unannounced classroom visits, each followed by a face-to-face coaching conversation and brief narrative summary -- actually improved…

This study is a phenomenological inquiry into the experiences of female high school principals who participated in leadership coaching during the first years of their principalships. Understanding how female principals found value in their leadership coaching, discovering the experiences between leadership coaches and the participants that yielded…

Engaging in instructional coaching to prepare educators for leadership is the change agent needed within a school to improve teaching and learning. This study focuses on one of the informal roles of educational leadership: instructional coaching. There is an insufficiency of research focusing on instructional coaching; therefore, this study will…

It can be hard for leaders to find inspiration and joy when times are as stressful as they have been in the last two years. Coaching can help principals step back and rediscover their motivation or find new sources of inspiration. Coaching is a powerful approach to assist principals in being leaders of high-performing schools where students and…

Although there are some federal and state statutes and regulations regarding principal evaluation systems, there are a variety of principal evaluation systems across the nation and in California. California's principal evaluation system is at the district level, meaning that implementation and effectiveness rest solely on the district. A district…

Supporting principals in building capacity to balance both instructional leadership and managerial competence is an essential task. Recognizing that principals do not directly teach students, their impact on school outcomes is broadly understood to be second only to teacher classroom instruction (Grissom & Loeb, 2011; Grissom et al., 2015;…

Effective instructional coaching provides personalized guidance and support to help teachers continuously improve their instructional practices. This Spotlight will help you investigate evidence-based strategies for effective teacher PD; evaluate real examples of personalized coaching programs; discover the potential benefits of on-demand PD;…

Traditional professional development models for principals focused on managerial tasks are presented in isolated, task-driven episodes. Today's principals lead complex and challenging high-accountability environments along with playing an expanded role of instructional leadership for boosting student achievement. The problem is school principals…

This non-experimental quantitative study aimed to examine the relationship between principal coaching and principal job satisfaction. The study had two research questions: Is there a relationship between the coaching from central office administrators and principals' job satisfaction? Which coaching practices from central office administrators, as…

As principals focus on instructional leadership, principal supervisors must shift from the managerial stance to developing principals' instructional leadership capacity. The problem is supervisors are unprepared to support principals in shifting to instructional leadership, due to a lack of time and instructional leadership capacity to engage in…

This study investigates how principals position specialized teachers (i.e., teachers with expertise in a specific area who are assigned to build the capacity of teachers through professional development) and how these positions might enable and constrain the teachers' actions. Today, a general tendency to foster professionalization by establishing…