Principal Leadership for School-Wide Transformation of Elementary Mathematics Teaching: Why the Principal’s Conception of Teacher Learning Matters

Abstract

Supporting teacher learning for normative change in classroom learning environments creates significant demands on principal leadership. We offer an analytic framework that aims to understand principal practice for instructional transformation. The framework examines how the principal’s conception of teacher learning shapes practice in relation to particular contexts and support systems. We illustrate the explanatory power of this framework by using it to make sense of one elementary principal’s practice in leading her school for instructional transformation in mathematics. Our analysis contributes to how leadership efforts to transform instruction might be studied and ultimately supported.