The Crowd in the Principal’s Office 33Figure 1: The Framework for School Leadership Accomplishments (Adapted from Bellamy,
1999; Copyright G.T. Bellamy, 1997. Used with Permission).
(open vs. closed campuses, many curriculum options vs. common experiences for all; teaching
that involves much or little homework, and so on). This means that school leadership
involves more than technical work to reach desired criteria defined elsewhere, whether by
research or policy. It is also a task of civic leadership that involves actively understanding
and leading a community as it comes to working agreements about desired school goals and
conditions.
STEWARDING SCHOOL CONDITIONS THROUGH FOUR LEADERSHIP DOMAINS
To highlight this expanded school leadership role, we conceptualize the principal’s
responsibility to steward school conditions as four domains of leadership, concerned with
effective action, sustainable goals, strategic focus, and social capital. Figure 2 illustrates how
the four domains are intertwined throughout each school year.
Leadership for effective action occurs as principals select from a large number of
developing situations which ones to address and then decide how to act in order to achieve
desired solutions (Immegart & Boyd, 1979). While rapidly developing circumstances in
schools can make the principalship feel like a rush of disconnected episodes (Barth, 1990),
our view emphasizes that daily action is always in pursuit of school conditions that satisfy
locally defined success criteria. The other three domains of school leadership set the stage for
effective action and affect school outcomes through their influence on which issues principals
select for attention and what they consider to be successful outcomes from these
interventions.