How Should Principals Spend Their Time?

Research Findings

The best research study I’ve read about principals’ actual use of time during the day was produced by Horng, Klasik, and Loeb in 2010. Their team of researchers from Stanford University shadowed 65 principals in Miami, coding what they were doing every five minutes for an entire day, constructing an accurate picture of how principals actually spent their time. They followed up on that data by then looking at outcomes at each school, which they measured through test scores, teacher satisfaction surveys, and community surveys. They found that principals in higher performing schools spent greater portions of their day on instruction, organization management, and external relations than did those principals leading lower performing schools. In this study, “organization management” included managing budgets and resources, hiring personnel, dealing with concerns from teachers, managing non-instructional staff, networking with other principals, maintaining campus facilities, and developing and monitoring a safe school environment. Old hands in school leadership will recognize these activities as key to maintaining safety and order - the essential underpinnings to academic achievement for all students.

Answering the Question

To answer the question about how a principal should spend her time, I’ll assume that our principal is not new in her position at the school, that the school is not new in its life cycle, and that the school is safe and orderly. The aim of school is to maximize student learning, and higher levels of learning will emerge from better teaching, which means that the principal should spend as much of her time as possible engaged in work which most improves teaching. She must focus on better teaching because that is the variable over which she can have the most influence. In my experience, the activities which have the greatest impact on teacher instructional practice are those in which they work together as learning professionals. One great way for a principal to be actively engaged in collaborative professional practice with her teachers is through her presence at and involvement in PLC meetings. Those small team meetings are where the nitty-gritty of instructional decision-making occurs, and the principal and her assistant principals can learn a lot and play a vital role in those gatherings.

While active engagement in PLC meetings is a great way to work with teachers during their non-instructional time, successful principals need to find ways to work with their teachers during instructional time in ways that will impact their practice. One of the most powerful professional learning opportunities for teachers and principals is the instructional rounds process. Best described by Elizabeth City (2011), instructional rounds begin with identifying a problem of practice, breaking into small teams to observe selected colleagues, de-briefing those observations via a non-evaluative protocol, and identifying the shared work the observing colleagues will pursue next, based on their learning from the rounds process. Done correctly, instructional rounds are highly effective at promoting professional learning. Rounds make the principal a learner alongside her teachers, and they better equip everyone to improve instruction in the school.

References

City, E.A. (2011, August). “Learning from instructional rounds.” Educational Leadership, 36-41.

Horng, E.L., Klasik, D., & Loeb, S. (2010). “Principal’s time use and school effectiveness.” American Journal of Education, 116, 491-523.

A Note About This Article

This article was originally written as a response to a question posed by Larry Ferlazzo in his Blog which is featured on Education Week’s website. A copy of the article has been posted on my own website.

I’d love to hear your thoughts. I can be reached at [email protected]