Instructional leadership among assistant principals in southeastern Texas

Education

This section provides an overview of the instruments that will be used to study assistant principals and instructional leadership. It also provides details of research design variables and scales that will measure the assistant principal's participation in instructional leadership, their perceptions of what impedes the progress of instructional leadership and what they feel can be done to fix the problem. Finally, it describes study participant targets and explains planned data collection and data analysis techniques.

The scope of this work is to assess assistant principals in southeastern Texas to obtain their views on instructional leadership. The intent is to determine the degree to which instructional leadership exists in their current responsibilities and initiatives that they feel will help progress leadership implementation at the assistant principal level.

Instruments

The survey will take advantage of three instruments. The first will be a revised version of the Sources of Instructional Leadership developed by Newberg and Glatthorn in 1984. This instrument rates school leaders on their performance of instructional leadership and will be the only method used in the survey for determining leadership performance. The second instrument's purpose is to rate reasons that impact the lack of instructional leadership by assistant principals while the third instrument will obtain the assistant principal's view of how effective suggested solutions might be. The source of these later two instruments will be from the author of the study proposal.

3.3 Research Design

This study will use written surveys questionnaires designed to employ mostly qualitative methods to answer the following questions:

How much do assistant principals function as instructional leaders?

What reasons prevent instructional leadership from being incorporated in their roles?

What measures do assistant principals feel should be taken to increase their instructional leadership activities?

Instrument two and three will be designed to compliment each other. For every impediment to instructional leadership, a solution will be presented that might resolve it. The following elements will be measured in the survey:

Instrument Two

Impediment to Instructional Leadership

Instrument Three

Possible Resolution

Training

Formal Course Work

Mentorship By Principal

Hierarchical Organizations

Training of Organization Structures and Behavior

Poor Managers

Change the Selection Process for Principals

Resource Constraints

Hire Additional Staff

Delegate Responsibilities to Teachers

Reactive School Systems

Educate the Public

Government Intervention

Insufficient Reward Systems

Career Mobility

Current Compensation Package

Principal's Instructional Leadership Skills

3.3 Participants

This research study will target 150 assistant principals in southeastern Texas from approximately XX schools, representing approximately XX percent of all schools in this region. This will be an effort to provide a representative sample of the assistant principal population in this geographic region rather than an attempt to identify schools or assistant principals with similar characteristics.

3.5 Problem Statement

There's a lot of data to demonstrate the lack of instructional leadership in schools, but little research that has obtained the assistant principal's view of the factors that prevent their ability to be an instructional leader and solutions that could possibly address this problem. Although data suggest that there is very little instructional leadership at the assistant principal level, it will still be necessary to obtain these results to obtain data that is specific to the region being studied and to obtain the most current data possible.

3.6 Data Collection Procedures

All data needed for this analysis will be obtained through the mailing of all 150 written letters and surveys directly to the assistant principals. A letter will explain the purpose and importance of the survey, give suitable information about the academic institution and surveyor request survey completion, and provide contact details for returning the survey. Phone calls and emails may be used to encourage participation if initial response rates are low, but these forms of communication will not be used in the formal data collection process. Additional studies may also be mailed if response rates become an issue. The goal is to obtain at least thirty completed surveys, representing a twenty percent response rate.

3.7 Data Analysis Procedures

All survey results will be entered into a software package and codified with the same rankings that have been offered by the survey. Next, rankings and percentages as well as mean averages will be used to analyze survey results. Also, linear regression analysis will be used to explore the relationship between lack of instructional leadership and primary causes and also primary causes and possible solutions.

Additional analytical techniques may be employed as knowledge is gleaned from the initial analysis.

Glatthorn, A., and Newberg, N. (1984). A team approach to instructional leadership. Educational Leadership, 41(5)