Education This Section Provides an Overview of

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 Additional Training of Principals Instruments two and three will use the same scale rankings as the Sources of Instructional Leadership, but will modify the content of the scale to reflect agreement or disagreement to problems and solutions as shown in the following table: SOIC Instrument Two Instrument Three 0=I do not perform this task at all 0=I do not agree that this is an issue 0=I do not agree that this is a solution 1=I perform this task once per semester 1=I somewhat disagree that this is an issue 1=I somewhat disagree that this is a solution 2=I perform this task once per month 2=I somewhat agree that this is an issue 2=I somewhat agree that his is a solution.

3=I perform this task once per week 3=I agree this is an issue. 3=I agree that this is a solution. 4=I perform this task every day strongly agree that this is an issue strongly agree that this is a solution. The use of the same scale hierarchy as SOIC should help reduce confusion by the survey participant and eliminate possibilities of survey bias. The length of the survey will be approximately two to three pages.

There is some concern about the length, especially given the time constraints and stress that the assistant principal is under. However, the extent is necessary to fulfill the study's intent of being one of the first studies to understand the assistant principal's views on factors that impede instructional leadership and what they feel will work to promote leadership. Because of the length, the study will avoid any use of open ended questions and will only use a numerical scaling.

This should greatly reduce the time required of the assistant principal to complete the study. 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.