Principal preparation: international perspectives

Principal preparation: international perspectives

Article Type: Guest editorial From: Journal of Educational Administration, Volume 46, Issue 6

The significance of the educational leader’s role has endured in the educational literature for decades. Wolcott’s (1973) Man in the Principal’s Office provided me with a beginning impression of what a principal did, at least in the village school on the west coast of Canada where Wolcott conducted his ethnographic study. That book helped me understand better that the principal had important formal and informal linkages with students, staff, and community members. House’s (1974) Politics of Educational Innovation offered insight into the theoretical dimension of the politics of leadership and school reform, while Sarason’s (1971) The Culture of the School and the Problem of Change informed me that I ought to start with the principal if I wanted to influence change in a school. Schmuck et al. (1982) and his colleagues led me to a strong appreciation for planning, problem solving, and group development through my reading of their book The Second Handbook of Organization Development in Schools. As a very young student of education, I devoured Neill’s (1960) Summerhill and pondered what schools could be if educational leaders spent more time considering what their schools felt like from a student’s perspective.

However, it was not until I was appointed a school principal in Saskatchewan, Canada, in 1985 that I finally began to really understand the complexity, responsibility, and privilege of the role. That is, educational leadership was no longer a theoretical construct. I had to live and breathe my role in a school alongside many other individuals in the building and a host of others in the community, all of whom had a huge stake in how well I did my job. I realized quickly just how easy it is to talk about the principalship and how difficult it is to do it responsibly and well, even in a stable, relatively homogeneous community.

Since my years of service as a principal, the role has become much more complicated and, I think, more challenging. Fortunately, we have increased our knowledge of the most influential role in a school, that of the principal. However, the role keeps changing because of the influence of global population shifts, information and communication technology, pluralism and multiculturalism, for example.

That is why the articles contained in this special issue of the Journal of Educational Administration are timely and informative. They add to our accumulating knowledge of the principalship from a theoretical perspective and, very important, they do so by looking at the role through the eyes of practitioners. These are informative reports because, quite simply, we do not know all that we should about how to prepare new principals.

The majority of the articles report work completed as part of the International Study of Principal Preparation (ISPP, 2008), a coordinated study underway in ten countries – Australia, Canada, England, Jamaica, Mexico, Scotland, South Africa, Tanzania, Turkey, and the USA – and about to be implemented in China. The study seeks to gather information that will guide those who prepare principals for their first appointments. It addresses the question “How useful are principal preparation programs to novice principals?”

In their ISPP report about the experiences of new principals in Scotland, Cowie and Crawford provide a hopeful view of the high levels of enthusiasm and commitment among the principals they studied. However, the authors caution that educational improvement ought to be a primary focus of the principals and they observed that this was not readily evident in their study. They called for greater attention to the support and development needs of new principals.

The ISPP article by Nelson, de La Colina, and Boone profiles the experiences over two years of a group of novice principals in the southern USA. The researchers caution that focusing too much on efficiency and accountability may contribute to the socialization of principals to focus on managerialism rather than the relational components of leadership. They call for a greater focus in principal preparation programs on instructional leadership, not only on what it is but also on how to be an instructional leader and why it is important.

Slater, Garcia, and Lopez Gorosave report on their research in Mexico conducted within the framework of the larger ISPP study. These researchers used the four frames proposed by Bolman and Deal (2003) – structural, human resource, symbolic, and political – to examine the challenges of one first-year principal and the efforts he made to resolve them. For instance, the principal described his frustration with the paperwork imposed by the structure of the larger system within which he operated. He noted his frustration with the greater concern for form than for content that his immediate supervisor exhibited, leading to tension and conflict. These and other observations led the authors to make a series of recommendations about how principals in Mexico might be better prepared.

The ISPP is being conducted in East Africa where Onguko, Abdalla, and Webber observed the range of public and private institutions in Kenya and Tanzania that offered educational leadership programs. They noted the lack of capacity in East Africa to address sufficiently the widespread need for principal preparation. They reported gaps in the content of principal preparation programs, particularly in the areas of instructional leadership, educational technology, and visioning. Finally, the researchers called for more detailed empirical reports of principal preparation in sub-Saharan Africa.

In their ISPP report, Wildy and Clarke report findings from their decade of studies of novice principals in Australia. They argue for the importance of rich local contextual knowledge and go on to propose a framework for principal preparation that also promotes knowledge and understanding the complex daily interactions that principals have with members of their school communities. Further, they call for deep understandings of the educational system within which principals operate and note that dealing with the system requires the nurturing of confidence, determination, and political sophistication.

In one of the non-ISPP reports included in this collection, Karstanje and Webber describe some of the causes of ongoing interest in educational leadership in East Europe and present a profile of the elements of school management that can be used to plan leadership development programming. They also share lessons learned during the application of the framework in the planning, implementation, and assessment of a leadership development program in Bulgaria.

In her article, Sherman presents the views of participants in a unique series of visualization exercises that were delivered in Canada as part of a graduate program in educational leadership. The author analyzed information from personal case studies that participants created using a visualization technique. As a result of her study, Sherman highlights the need for greater connection between university leadership preparation programming and the daily reality of principals’ work. She also calls for greater attention to the decision-making capacity of future and newly appointed principals.

The final article in this collection was written by Scott and Webber. It is a synthesis of the findings of the ISPP and of two other studies, one conducted in Canada and another completed in several international settings. Scott and Webber present a conceptual frame called the Life-Long Learning Leader (4L) framework intended for use by designers and providers of leadership development and of cross-cultural leadership development. The framework contains eight dimensions that leadership development programming should address: career stage, career aspirations, visionary capacity, boundary breaking entrepreneurialism, professional skills, instructional design and assessment literacy, crisis management, and approaches to leadership development.

The readings included in this special issue of the Journal of Educational Administration represent a very positive direction for research that is focused on principal preparation. The articles reflect coordinated research that is being conducted in a wide range of international settings. This sort of research is essential in an era when educational policies and practices spread quickly around the globe and are applied in very different settings. Educational leaders must develop the capacity to work across cultures, to utilize information and communication technology in pedagogically sound ways, and to become educational entrepreneurs. If, as Leithwood (2007, p. 44) claims, leadership “is all about direction and influence”, then the authors of the articles that follow indeed are providing leadership in determining how school leaders ought to be prepared.

Charles F. Webber