What Drives Principal Success? Instructionally Focused Interactions. Building a Productive School Climate. Facilitating Collaboration. Strategic Management. Leading for Equity. Takeaways for School Leaders. A new research study sheds light on the impact of effective principals—and what makes them different.
A school's success is largely determined by the effectiveness of its principal—decades of research have made this clear. Less settled is the question of what principals need to know and do to drive positive outcomes in their schools. Thousands of studies have addressed some facet of this question, but making sense of their findings is a big challenge, and not just because of the volume.
Studies vary widely in the specific component of principals' work they examine, their data collection approaches, their methods of analysis, and the quality of the research. In a recent report funded by The Wallace Foundation, we wrangled the evidence on the connection between school principals and school outcomes, focusing on research conducted in U.
Several important themes emerged, including just how important principals are in driving school outcomes and the commonalities in what effective principals do—interacting with teachers around instruction, building strong climates where teachers collaborate, and managing strategically. We also delved into the importance of leading for equity. Let's look at these themes more closely. Just how large of an impact does a strong principal have on student achievement?
The longitudinal nature of the data was key because the researchers could observe the same schools being led by different principals and the same principal leading different schools in different years. With this mix, we were able to isolate student outcomes that can be attributed to the principal from the effects of other factors beyond the principal's control like what neighborhood the school is in.
These studies showed that the quality of a school's principal is a big determinant of student achievement. To illustrate how big, consider a typical school that has a below-average principal—say, a principal at the 25th percentile of effectiveness defined by student test score growth.
In the analysis of our report, we show the gains that could be expected if the school district replaced this principal with an above-average one that is, at the 75th percentile of effectiveness. Students in the school would gain about three months of learning in math and reading in subsequent school years. An important addendum to this finding that principals are a big determinant of student achievement is that principals also affect all students in the school. And principals impact not just student learning but the experiences that students—and teachers—have in their schools.
The principal can influence how often a student is absent or suspended, and how likely a teacher is to stay in the school for another year.
For these reasons, it is hard for us to imagine a better investment in a school than the quality of its leadership. After quantifying the effect that principals can have on a school, we tried to discover what effective principals know and do.
Although the research we reviewed took on many approaches and perspectives, we found three overlapping domains of skills that strong principals have mastered— 1 instruction, 2 people, and 3 the organization see Figure 1. Instruction refers to skills that directly support teachers' work in classrooms.
Principals need to be able to differentiate effective and ineffective instructional approaches and make useful suggestions about what teachers might do differently.
People skills are about building and maintaining relationships: good communication skills, caring, and the capacity to build trust within the school community. Skills related to the organization are those that would be necessary to run any complex entity, not just a school. These include data use, strategic thinking, and ability to allocate resources to advance school goals. Effective principals draw on all three sets of skills to engage in the behaviors or practices that drive a successful school.
Our review identified four sets of practices:. The close work principals do with teachers to improve instructional practice has three dimensions. The first is leveraging teacher evaluation. High-quality evaluation systems center on structured, rubric-based teacher observations to improve teacher practice and student achievement. Principals are the linchpin of these systems, building buy-in, putting in the time to conduct observations, and taking care to ensure that ratings are accurate so that they can be acted on.
Second, and closely related, is feedback and coaching. Strong principals use what they observe in classrooms to give teachers useful feedback, which evidence suggests can raise teachers' impacts on their students.
Third, effective principals use data to guide specific instructional decisions, drive the school's overall instructional program, inspire action around improvement, and monitor the school's progress toward its goals.
EdWeek Research Center. EdWeek Top School Jobs. EdWeek Market Brief. Menu Search. Sign In Subscribe. What Makes a Principal Great? Reset Search. By Cindi Rigsbee — February 18, 5 min read. Share article Remove Save to favorites Save to favorites. Cindi Rigsbee. She was recently named as one of four finalists for National Teacher of the Year.
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See More Events. Page Content. A decade of Wallace Foundation-supported research and work in school districts and states suggests that five practices are key to helping principals improve teaching and learning in their schools: Shaping a vision of academic success for all students, one based on high standards; Creating a climate hospitable to education so safety, a cooperative spirit and other foundations of fruitful interaction prevail; Cultivating leadership in others so teachers and other adults assume their part in realizing the school vision; Improving instruction to enable teachers to teach at their best and students to learn at their utmost; and Managing people, data and processes to foster school improvement.
Points of Interest. Effective leadership begins with the development of a school-wide vision of commitment to high standards and the success of all students. The principal helps to spell out that vision and get all others on board with it.
The more open a principal is to spreading leadership around, the better it is for student learning. Effective leadership from a variety of sources—principals, teachers, staff teams and others—is associated with better student performance on math and reading tests. A central part of being a great school leader is cultivating leadership in others.
Effective leaders focus laser-like on the quality of instruction in their schools. They emphasize research-based strategies to improve teaching and learning and initiate discussions about instructional approaches, both in teams and with individual teachers. Effective principals pursue research-based strategies to help teachers improve their classroom work.
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