Investment in instructional leadership development at the school and district levels. One of the hallmarks of districts that have succeeded in moving from low to high performing in terms of student performance is an intensive long-term investment in developing instructional leadership capacity at the school as well as at the district levels. At the school level these efforts focus at least on principals. In many such districts, however, reform efforts include the establishment of new school-based teacher leader positions to work closely with principals and with district consultants to provide professional development assistance (e.g., demonstrations, in-class coaching, facilitating school PD arrangements) to individual teachers and teams of teachers (grade level, cross-grades) in the targeted focuses of reform. These teacher leaders go under a variety of names -- instructional coaches, literacy coaches, resident teachers, skills specialists. The commonality is the recognition that principals alone cannot be expected to provide the intensity and frequency of school-based professional assistance that teachers require in order to implement significant changes in practice and student learning in the classroom.
Professional development is also provided to teacher leaders in the content focuses of local reforms (e.g., curriculum standards and content, instructional strategies, analyzing student data) and in change process strategies (e.g., classroom coaching methods).
Principals, however, are the main priority for instructional leadership development in these districts. The emphasis is on helping principals development the knowledge, skills, and dispositions to effectively engage with and support teachers in their efforts to assess student performance in relation to district/state standards and focuses for improvement, to involve teachers in developing school improvement plans focused on school needs in the context of district priorities for improvement, to become skilled at evidence-informed decision-making, and to become skilled observers and interpreters of the quality and progress of teaching and learning in their schools. Successful districts highlighted in recent case studies mount long-term professional development programs for practicing principals that typically involve a combination of off-site PD activities (e.g., summer institutes) and a variety of professional learning supports built into their regular working schedule throughout the year (e.g., monthly “principals conferences” led by superintendents and consultants; reform-focused professional support groups and networks of principals across the system; mentoring and coaching of new and struggling principals). Togneri and Anderson (2003) and other case study researchers report that many of these districts favor in-house principal leadership development programs over the kinds of generic licensure-oriented principal training programs typically offered at
universities. This extends to the in-house recruitment and creation of local professional learning opportunities for promising principal candidates from the district teacher corps.