34 INVITED CHAPTERS
Leadership for sustainable goals engages the principal in understanding a community’s
various expectations for its school, leading conversations to develop working agreements
about priorities, and translating those priorities into appropriate criteria for school
accomplishments. By listening carefully and starting important conversations, a principal
can learn about the relative importance a community gives to orderliness, personal
appearance, school events, healthy meals, special credentials, sensitive subjects, and so on.
Leadership for strategic goals helps set the stage for effective action when school leaders use
their understanding of community priorities to clearly define the success criteria they want
each of the nine school accomplishments to satisfy.
Leadership for strategic focus involves assessing a school’s current performance in
relation to both learning outcomes and school character, identifying gaps, and deciding which
school conditions, if improved, would be most likely to improve results. The description of
principals as “master diagnosticians” by Portin, Schneider, DeArmond, and Gundlach (2003)
provides a good starting point for understanding this leadership domain. In our
conceptualization, school leaders use information about local priorities and learning gaps to
select one or more school accomplishments for change. This, in turn, provides both focus for
improvement efforts and a “watch list” for problem finding during the year.
Leadership for social capital occurs as principals seek to influence the interactions among
members of the school community, so that they work together to reach collective decisions
and take collaborative action. A community’s capacity for collaboration can be enhanced, for
example, when principals personally bridge communication among groups, establish
schedules and work structures that foster collaboration, lead conversations about norms for
the school community, and personally model the espoused norms and commitments
(Halverson, 2003; Smylie & Hart, 1999). Leadership for social capital adds a social
dimension to the daily work of effective action—will the principal’s action increase
communication and trust among members of the school community as well as achieving other
desired results?
POSSIBILITIES FOR THE PROFESSION
While our writing about principals’ work focuses primarily on practice, it also points to
possibilities for the profession as a whole. In previous work we have suggested how new
perspectives on knowledge and values could strengthen the school leadership profession
(Bellamy et al., 2006; 2007).
Organizing professional knowledge. Following Bruner’s (1986) distinction between
narrative and analytic ways of thinking, we have used this conceptualization of principals’
work to recommend two complementary methods for structuring professional knowledge.
First, the nine accomplishments offer a framework for organizing analytic knowledge around
two questions: (a) what considerations inform the definition of quality for each
accomplishment? and (b) what strategies appear useful as schools work to realize each
accomplishment? Knowledge that contributes to answering these two questions is broadly
eclectic and comes from legal, ethical, and critical reasoning, social science research, and
craft knowledge (Bellamy et al., 2006).
Our second recommendation for structuring professional knowledge focuses on narratives
of practice and emphasizes how the four leadership domains interact over the course of a
school year. We have suggested “annual cases” of school leadership as a strategy for
developing, organizing. and sharing craft knowledge in the principalship (Muth, Bellamy,
Fulmer, & Murphy, 2004). These annual cases provide a picture of a school year, largely in