Strategies for Transforming the Daily Work of Principals: A Study of Present Habits and Opportunities for Change 269add little or no value to improved student achievement. Interns were asked to develop
strategies around four action categories: eliminate, delegate, restructure or enhance the
identified practice.
Collaborative Analysis of Data
For the analysis of how principals spend their time, interns shared their lists of leadership
practices and collaborated on the identification of categories that emerged from the data. The
categories were used to sort all of the data into common areas of leadership practice.
Duplicates were eliminated and when items appeared to not easily fall into a category, a
consensus process was used to determine where to place the item. In cases where several
items could not be categorized but appeared to be related to each other, a new category was
established. Interns also collaborated in teams and with their principals in the identification of
strategies to reduce daily time devoted to practices that had little or no impact on the
improvement of teaching and learning.
RESULTS
Daily Practices of Principals
Interns and their principals identified a total of 385 leadership practices that were common
to the school principalship. Ten categories emerged from the data. No single principal was
reported to have practiced all of the specific items under each category, but in most cases,
invested time in all of the ten areas over the course of the three weeks of data collection.
Although the frequency of occurrences was not recorded, the breadth of the number of
specific practices under each category suggested that principals engage in a large variety of
tasks and responsibilities reflected in the literature. See Table 1.
Influence on Improved Teaching and Learning
Using the four-point scale, interns rated the majority of specific leadership practices under
eight of the ten categories as weak, (bearing little or no relationship to the improvement of
teaching and learning). Only work under the categories of special education and 504s, and
instructional leadership received a majority of ratings in the mild, moderate and strong
columns. Seven of the categories contained 93% or more of their ratings in the weak/mild
columns. The mean scores of the ratings revealed that practices associated with staff issues,
special education and 504s, and instructional leadership were substantially stronger than the
other seven areas of practice.
Strategies to Change the Daily Work of the Principal
Interns and principals identified multiple strategies to eliminate, delegate, restructure or
enhance practices in order to spend more time in areas that improve teaching and learning and
reduce time in those that do not. Some participants decided to eliminate practices such as
conducting morning announcements because they realized that cut into important instructional
time. In other strategies, they restructured duties such as event supervision and delegated
these to others, with the appropriate amount of authority and responsibility. If participants
wanted to enhance a practice such as classroom observations, they expanded their efforts by