Description
Leadership support for principals comes in many forms. How can we strategically focus on guiding and supporting our principals to improve their instructional leadership in transforming the education our students receive? This program evaluation will provide research on how a District in Southern California built a strategic system to support principals, making the instructional leadership role a focus, through coherence and clarity of the District’s vision to support all students’ success and academic achievement. Coherence has four main components: focusing direction, cultivating cultures that are collaborative, deepening learning, and assuring accountability around the work. At the center of these four components of the Coherence Framework, is leadership. This Southern California District developed initiatives to support leaders who are driving the instructional work at their school sites. The initiatives supported by the Coherence Framework are: Action Plans, Executive Professional Development, and Squad Coaching. Elements of each initiative are designed to support the development of the overall District plan, focusing on teaching and learning and developing principals’ skills as instructional leaders. This program evaluation did provide summative evidence that the District’s initiative has been successful in the first 2 years of implementation, of positively impacting the instructional leadership development of site principals. Further, the initiative was found to meet the criteria of being coherent. Each of the three initiative elements cohesively complimented one another, were useful and effective in promoting the initiative’s impact, and coherence of developing site-based instructional leaders.
