by Jason Huff, Courtney Preston, Ellen B. Goldring & J. Edward Guthrie –

Background/Context: Modest gains in NAEP scores by American high schools over the past twenty years highlight the need to identify different factors associated with gains in student achievement. Amongst those potential factors is school leadership; limited research on leaders’ work in secondary schools highlights the need to understand how high school leaders structure their schools to promote student learning.

Purpose/Objective/Research Question: We ask the question, What distinguishes leaders’ practices in more effective high schools from those in less effective high schools that serve large proportions of at-risk youth?

Research Design: We first identify more and less effective high schools using value-added scores, and we analyze interview, observational, and survey data collected in these schools to compare and contrast how leaders support key practices and organizational routines by their staff. Our analyses include work by traditional leaders (principals and assistant principals) as well as other leaders’ (e.g. department chairs, teacher leaders) practices within the schools.

Conclusions/Recommendations: We found differences between higher and lower value-added schools in terms of leaders’ conceptions of the intended routines (those ideal policies that faculty are to carry out) and their attention to the implementation of them, through closer examination of faculty members’ actual actions or their directed support for faculty members’ practices. Two primary themes characterize the differences in their practices. First, leaders in higher value-added high schools are more involved in, intentional about, and attentive to how their ideal/intended routines are implemented, thus ensuring that teachers’ actual practices are changed. They focus on how these routines provide ongoing monitoring and feedback for their faculty to build and improve teachers’ quality instruction, alignment of curriculum, and systems of support for students. Second, higher value-added school leaders provided more targeted, systemic efforts to support personalized learning for students.

The National Assessment of Educational Progress has found only moderate gains in high school students’ learning over the past two decades, and international assessments indicate that, compared to elementary and middle school gaps, differences between American high school students and high school students in other nations are widest (Grigg, Donahue, & Dion, 2007; Provasnik, Gonzales, & Miller, 2009). This work suggests a need to investigate factors that are associated with gains in secondary student achievement specifically because high schools differ significantly from elementary schools because of their larger size, multiple departments grouped by subject area, heterogeneous student bodies, and their role in providing students with an entry into the larger society and workforce (Fuhrman & Elmore, 2004; Jacobs & Kritsonis, 2006).

The majority of such research has focused on teachers, who make the biggest in-school contributions to student achievement, often to the neglect of principals, who make the second largest contribution (Hallinger & Heck, 1996; Rockoff, 2004). In particular, there is a need to understand how principals in high-achieving high schools structure their schools in ways that promote student learning.

Prior research across all school levels suggests that schools whose leaders articulate an explicit school vision, generate high expectations and goals for all students, monitor their schools’ performance through regular use of data and frequent classroom observations, and focus on the organizational management of their schools demonstrate increases in student learning (Horng, Klasik, & Loeb, 2010; Klar & Brewer, 2013; Leithwood & Riehl, 2005; Sun & Leithwood, 2015). Research also suggests that principals play important roles in implementing reforms: in schools where principals actively work to secure curricular materials and act as resources for instructional reforms, their teachers more frequently use new instructional strategies (Nettles & Herrington, 2007; Quinn, 2002).

While earlier analyses point to the influences that principals can have through things like selecting high-quality teachers and setting high academic goals (Brewer, 1993), more work is needed to examine leaders’ influences in high schools (Halverson & Clifford, 2013; Portin, Russell, Samuelson, & Knapp, 2013). Recent studies also point to differences not only in how high school leaders actually use their time, but also in how their practices influence student achievement. For example, high school principals spend less time on instructional activities such as classroom walkthroughs than their elementary peers and the time they spend on walkthroughs is negatively associated with achievement growth in math, while time spent on coaching and evaluating teachers is related to achievement growth in mathematics (Grissom, Kalogrides, & Loeb, 2013; Grissom, Loeb, & Master, 2013). Very few studies, however, have focused on how high school principals organize and implement leadership practices around student learning (Crum & Sherman, 2010; Halverson & Clifford, 2013). These gaps in the literature are crucial to address because of high schools’ limited success in raising student achievement for all students.

The purpose of this paper is to analyze how high school leaders implement and support different practices and organizational routines that target improved instruction and learning. We ask the question: What distinguishes leaders’ practices in more effective high schools from those in less effective high schools that serve large proportions of at-risk youth? We identify more and less effective high schools using value-added scores and analyze data collected in these schools to compare and contrast how leaders support key practices and organizational routines by their staff. Our analyses include work by traditional leaders (principals and assistant principals [APs]) as well as other leaders’ (e.g., department chairs, teacher leaders) practices within the schools.

In the remainder of this paper we first summarize the literature on effective schools and learning-centered leadership to illustrate the need to understand leaders’ roles in implementing or supporting those pervasive practices that characterize effective high schools. We also explain the concepts of “practice” and “organizational routine” that informed our analyses, to identify how school leaders influence their staffs’ work to improve instruction and learning. We then detail our methodology for choosing four case study schools and describe each school before explaining our analyses. Finally, we present our findings and discuss their significance for researchers and practitioners.

THE CHALLENGE TO UNDERSTANDING EFFECTIVE HIGH SCHOOL LEADERSHIP

Many recent high school improvement efforts focus on the implementation of specific programs such as career academies and Advancement Via Individual Determination (AVID), or instructional changes such as Peer Enabled Restructured Classroom (PERC) (see, for example, Kemple, Herlihy, & Smith, 2005; Quint, Bloom, Black, & Stephens, 2005; Thomas, Bonner, Everson, & Somers, 2015). However, reviews of research on high schools suggest that three decades of urban high school reform aimed at improving the academic performance of disadvantaged students have not resulted in substantially narrowing achievement gaps (Becker & Luthar, 2002; Cook & Evans, 2000; Davison, Seo, Davenport, Butterbaugh, & Davison, 2004; Clifford & Halverson, 2013). More recent studies of secondary schools highlight the impact that high-quality teacher-student interactions can have on achievement and provide evidence that interventions targeting teacher-student interactions may improve achievement (Allen et al., 2013; Allen, Hafen, Gregory, Mikami, & Pianta, 2015). There is little evidence, however, that any single program or practice will close more than a fraction of the achievement gap and reduce high school dropout (Berends, 2000; Miller, 1995). Instead, substantially improving learning opportunities for students from traditionally low-performing subgroups may require comprehensive, integrated, and coherent designs that simultaneously influence multiple components in schools (Chatterji, 2005; Shannon & Bylsma, 2002; Thompson & O’Quinn, 2001).

Principals often play central roles in implementing such comprehensive designs. As previously mentioned, school leaders who are linked to increases in student learning are those who focus on school organization, use data and classroom observations to monitor school performance, articulate an explicit vision, create a strong learning climate, and set high expectations for all students (Horng et al., 2010; Leithwood & Riehl, 2005; Murphy, Goldring, Cravens, Elliott, & Porter, 2007; Sebastian & Allensworth, 2012). Principals’ effects on student learning are also likely mediated by their efforts to improve teacher motivation and working conditions (Louis, Leithwood, Wahlstrom, & Anderson, 2010), as well as to hire high-quality personnel (Grissom & Loeb, 2011; Horng et al., 2010). This evidence thus points to the need for principals to address the broader conditions in schools that target improved learning.

However, the body of empirical research on effective leadership practices in schools is limited both conceptually and in terms of its applicability to high schools. Conceptually, much of the research on leadership in schools starts with a predetermined dimension of leadership—such as instructional leadership—with a list of behaviors and activities, and offers assessments or comparisons of principals’ adherence to specific, discrete practices that fit within the specified dimension (see for example, Branch, Hanushek, & Rivkin, 2013; Goldring, Huff, May, & Camburn, 2008; Grissom et al., 2013; Horng et al., 2010; Supovitz, Sirinides, & May, 2010). While research has developed multiple lists of effective characteristics of school leadership, work remains to identify how leaders cultivate the conditions such that their faculty pursue improved teaching and learning over a long period of time. In this regard, work in Chicago high schools finds that principals influence classroom practices through setting high expectations for college-going, creating program coherence, and securing high-quality professional development (Sebastian & Allensworth, 2012). Similarly, Wiley (2001), in her study of high schools and mathematics achievement, found that

learning in mathematics is increased when school administrators facilitate development of shared values and beliefs about the school’s mission, support actions focused on instructional development, communicate respect and value of teachers, and when there is a minimal degree of professional community among department teachers. That is, the effect of transformational leadership is enhanced by ongoing teacher learning, teacher collaboration, and cooperative focus by teachers on improving teaching and learning—professional community. (p. 25)

In the remainder of this section, we summarize the research and concepts that emerged from a review of the literature on effective high schools (Goldring, Porter, Murphy, Elliott, & Cravens, 2009; Preston, Goldring, Berends, & Cannata, 2012) and guided our examination of principals’ work. As we discuss in our methods section, these areas of learning-centered leadership guided our data collection and initial coding of the data for these domains.

Personalized learning connections refers to opportunities and strategies for staff to develop stronger relationships with students such that staff can provide more individual attention to them and foster their sense of belonging to the school (Lee & Smith, 1999; McLaughlin, 1994; Walker & Greene, 2009). Personalized learning connections can exist in high schools on a continuum from strong and robust, leading to belonging and connectedness, to weak and nonexistent, leading to alienation and, ultimately, dropout (Crosnoe, Johnson, & Elder, 2004; Hallinan, 2008; Nasir, Jones, & McLaughlin, 2011; Rumberger, 2001).

Systemic use of data refers to data-based analyses and/or decision-making that are critical practices for school improvement efforts. Access to data alone cannot guarantee more effective practice (Ingram, Seashore Louis, & Schroeder, 2004; Schildkamp & Visscher, 2010; Spillane, 2012). Despite limited examinations of data use in high schools, existing evidence suggests a number of elements essential to its effectiveness. First is the diffusion of both the availability of data and a faculty’s ability to analyze and act on the data (Copland, 2003; Schildkamp & Visscher, 2010; Spillane, 2012). When data access is centralized in the hands of a principal, data use can be limited by the principal’s personal beliefs and skills related to data use (Luo, 2008). Second, research suggests that collaborative data-based inquiry affects intermediate outcomes, increasing teachers’ investment in schoolwide issues, strengthening instructional efficacy (Huffman & Kalnin, 2003), and characterizing both mature and successful school improvement efforts (Copland, 2003; Tedford, 2008; Wilcox & Angelis, 2011). Finally, once data are available and discussed collaboratively, their use must permeate organizational routines in order to be effective (Ingram et al., 2004; Schildkamp & Visscher, 2010; Spillane, 2012). Research shows that even when data are widely available within the school and collaborative structures exist for teachers, data analysis and use must still become standard operating procedures before they can have an impact on practice (Schildkamp, Poortman, & Handelzalts, 2016). Findings suggest that data use is one mechanism to develop educators’ shared commitment to school goals and students, and it is a mechanism for helping adults and students collaborate and receive feedback to continue engaging in the “work” of schooling.

Rigorous and aligned curriculum focuses on the roles leaders play to ensure that schools provide rigorous content in core academic subjects (Gamoran, Porter, Smithson, & White, 1997). On the whole, high school curricula are driven by state standards, as required under the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 (2002) and the Every Student Succeeds Act (2015). Research on curriculum at the high school level centers around differences between vocational/technical curriculum or remedial courses and college preparatory curriculum, the effects of increasing curricular requirements for graduation, and access to curriculum, specifically advanced courses, for different groups of students.

Effective schools work to compress preexisting variability by promoting equal and equitable access to school resources and promoting the inclusion of all students in all aspects of the schooling experience; in other words, there is a focus on opportunities to learn. Lee and Burkham (2003) find that students in schools with more constrained curriculum have lower odds of dropping out, and literature suggests that effective schools should work to compress variability in course selection by race and class and ensure all students have access to advanced courses (Muller, Riegle-Crumb, Schiller, Wilkinson, and Frank, 2010). Further, effective schools also create variable and differentiated experiences to meet the needs of diverse learners by offering transition classes (Gamoran et al., 1997), schools within schools (Lee & Ready, 2007), career academies (Maxwell & Rubin, 2002), college outreach programs (Domina, 2009), and other differentiated programs to meet student needs. While these programs are targeted at subgroups within a school to meet a specific need, such as informing at-risk students about the college application process, research findings on the effectiveness of these programs are mixed, suggesting that the structures, programs, or practices intended to create variable experiences for certain subgroups are dependent on other domains of effective high schools, such as personalized learning connections or quality instruction.

Our final domain of focus, quality instruction, encompasses the teaching strategies that teachers employ to achieve high standards for all students. Trends in this research literature cluster around common practices and specific classroom foci. Common practices include collaborative group work (Staples, 2007), formative assessments (Brown, 2008), inquiry-based learning (Cohen & Ball, 2001), scaffolding, and introducing new concepts concretely (Alper, Fendel, Fraser, & Resek, 1997). These foci include creating structures and classroom climates where students are allowed to try and fail without negative consequences (Alper et al., 1997), making content not only relevant for real life, but important, and setting high expectations for all students (Boaler, 2008). The vast majority of more recent work on quality of instruction has focused on developing frameworks and corresponding classroom observation rubrics to define, monitor, and evaluate the quality of instruction in schools, such as the CLASS-S (Pianta, Hamre, & Mintz, 2011) and Framework for Teaching (Danielson, 2013). These frameworks, as well as others, suggest that high-quality instruction is rooted in a notion of engaged learning (instructional dialogue, feedback, responsiveness), whereas low quality instruction consistently allows students to be passive and disengaged as learners (seatwork, receivers of information, and limited accountability for learning).

TARGETING EVIDENCE OF LEADERS’ IMPACT ON PRACTICE

In our examination of leadership in higher and lower value-added schools, we studied faculty members’ direct statements about their leaders’ actions to support practices and routines that focused on improving teaching and learning. Our analyses did not rely on a set list of behaviors in order to examine how leadership influences the enactment of our four essential domains of effective schooling. Rather, we used the concept of  “practice” introduced by Spillane et al. (2011, 2012, and 2013), which they describe as “more or less coordinated, patterned, and meaningful interactions of people at work” (2011, p. 114). A key aspect of this notion of practice is the notion of Feldman and Pentland’s (2003) organizational routine, or “a repetitive, recognizable pattern of interdependent actions, carried out by multiple actors” (p. 105). According to Spillane (2011) such routines “structure day-to-day practice in schools by more or less framing and focusing interactions among school staff” (p. 116). Analyzing for repetitive practices enacted by multiple stakeholders, rather than looking for evidence of discrete behaviors, helps us to identify regular, patterned activity within schools rather than unique or random occurrences that have little broader impact on a faculty or its students. Such a focus also helps to identify what ongoing, sustained practices by staff may distinguish more versus less effective schools. Spillane et al. (2011) emphasize that such routines focus on interactions between individuals, not just their actions, and our analyses therefore targeted evidence of ongoing work by groups of individuals. With this framing of routines to include practice by multiple actors, we examined evidence of actions by traditional leaders such as administrators as well as others such as department chairs or other teacher leaders.

One final distinction is central to this part of our analyses: the intended(or “ostentive”) versus practiced (or “performative”) aspects of organizational routines. Feldman and Pentland (2003) explain, “the ostentive aspect is the ideal or schematic form of a routine. It is the abstract, generalized idea of the routine, or the routine in principle. The performative aspect of the routine consists of specific actions, by specific people, in specific places and times. It is the routine in practice” (p. 101). Spillane et al. (2011) contrast them in this way: “The ostentive aspect of organizational routines is part of the formal structure (i.e., the designed organization), whereas the performative aspect refers to administrative practice (i.e., the lived organization)” (p. 591). These authors all argue that studies of organizational routines must include examinations of the intended, ideal forms of practices, such as recommendations or formal expectations for what a group should do to examine school data, along with evidence that focuses on what different individuals actually do within the context of these expectations and their group. Only when researchers pay attention to both can they capture organizational routines in both their intent and their actual implementation. We thus used the notions of intended versus practiced aspects of routines to analyze and discuss how leadership in higher and lower value-added schools creates or supports pervasive, shared, and structured routines that guide faculty members’ practices to successfully implement the essential components.

With these four domains in mind—personalized learning connections, systemic use of data, rigorous and aligned curriculum, and quality instruction—we ask: How does leaders’ work vary in implementing and supporting key practices and organizational routines for effective schools? In this paper, we compared and contrasted how the leadership in two lower and two higher value-added high schools create routines, both intended and practiced, in these four domains.

SELECTION OF CASE STUDY SCHOOLS

We identified Broward County, Florida, as an urban district with a large population of students from traditionally low-performing groups. Broward County was chosen because of the diversity of its high schools, both in terms of performance and demographics, and for the availability of data linking students and teachers over time. We then identified four case study high schools that varied in terms of their effectiveness at improving student achievement among low-income and minority students and English language learners (ELLs). Using student scores from Florida’s Comprehensive Assessment Test (FCAT), we estimated school-level value-added models using 3 years of data, as well as separate estimates for students in different low-performing subgroups (low income, black, Hispanic, and ELL) to distinguish effective and less effective high schools for these groups.¹ This value-added model takes the form

ΔA_it = βX_it + φ_m + Γ_it + ν_it  (1)

where A_it represents the achievement gain for student i in year t relative to their prior-year score in year t-1, X is a vector of student characteristics for student i in year t including gender, race/ethnicity, limited English proficiency (LEP) program participation, free lunch status, reduced-price lunch status, gifted program participation, a set of disability categories for students in special education, student mobility (within-year and between-year school change) and pre-high-school (Grade 8) attendance, and normed math and reading test scores, φ_m is a school-specific fixed effect, Γ_it is a set of grade-by-year indicators to account for any unmeasured grade and year influences, such as variation in the difficulty of the test, and

ν_it is a random disturbance term.

Such school-level value-added estimates are correlated with other measures of school performance and are better indicators of school performance than school-level average test scores (Grissom, Kalogrides, & Loeb, 2014; Meyer, 1997). Studies such as Hill, Kapitula, and Umland’s (2011) offer evidence that value-added scores relate positively to measures of teachers’ content knowledge and their quality of instruction. Further, Meyer (1997) and Ballou, Sanders, and Wright (2004) contend that school-level value-added measurement is a significant advance in comparing schools, particularly over school performance average and median test scores. Other measures such as average or median test scores can be strongly influenced by students’ previous achievement, student mobility, and other nonschool factors. Value-added measures use statistical modeling that control for, to the extent possible, all nonschool factors that influence student achievement, which enables us to isolate schools’ contributions to their students’ performance. Furthermore, while tracking in high schools has the potential to bias teacher value-added estimates, the aggregate efficacy of internal tracking mechanisms may be a desirable component of school-level value-added measures, as the organization of the schedule and the allocation of teachers to courses should influence school performance measures (Harris, 2011).

While NCLB has only required states to test once in the high school grades, for over a decade, Florida has tested English/language arts and mathematics in more than one high school grade, improving our ability to identify more and less effective schools. Because we used 4 years of test score data in both math and reading to estimate school-level value-added for all high schools in the district, our estimated school effects represent the average contribution of a high school to student learning gains in either math or reading from 2005–06 to 2008–09, controlling for observed student characteristics.

We then identified four case study high schools that were a) relatively high-performing for all student groups or b) relatively low-performing for each student group, considering average value-added rankings for reading and math. Charter and magnet schools were not considered for selection as case study schools because their choice component may have influenced school-level value-added scores. Finally, we checked that the schools we identified had graduation rates consistent with our value-added results. Thus, our case study schools (2 higher value-added, 2 lower value-added) served large proportions of students in traditionally low-performing subgroups and were higher performing or lower performing relative to their district and the state as a whole. Below, we profile these four schools before discussing our analyses of each.

CASE STUDY DATA COLLECTION

We collected data from the four case study schools during three weeklong visits in the fall, winter, and spring of the 2010–2011 school year. Data collection included observations of full faculty meetings and professional learning community teams, and semistructured interviews with principals; APs; guidance counselors; department heads of English/language arts, mathematics, and science; and 18 tenth-grade teachers who taught those three subjects in regular and upper-level classes at each school. Principals were interviewed twice, during our fall and spring visits. We conducted classroom observations during our fall and winter visits in one class of each of the 18 teachers who were interviewed. Each teacher was observed four times (two observations per week) teaching the same class. Researchers used the Classroom Assessment Scoring System-Secondary (CLASS-S) to live code instruction and the classroom environment during these observations (Pianta, Hamre, Hayes, Mintz, & La Paro, 2007). In addition, we conducted focus group interviews with students and with teachers who had been identified as coaches or leaders of student activity groups. Students were selected for focus groups by their schools in order to include students from all level classes, all grades, and with different levels of involvement. Finally, on our spring visit, we shadowed 6 tenth-grade students in each school (three students from “higher” or accelerated/AP and “lower” or regular assignment tracks who together represented the demographics of the student body) for a day and interviewed these students at the end of the school day.

We designed our data collection process to allow both the form and function of our schools’ key programs, practices, and routines to emerge from inductive analyses of fieldwork data. By collecting data from actors in multiple positions within each case study school, we were able to incorporate multiple perspectives, triangulating findings for increased credibility (Lincoln & Guba, 1985). This study draws on our interview data with both leaders and teachers in the different schools. Our interviews also probed beyond the mere existence of formal programs and routines, which often communicate only the intended practices in which faculty should engage, to understand the depth and specificity of leadership’s expectations and actions to ensure that faculty actually carried out such activities (Spillane, 2012). We asked principals and teachers questions about topics ranging from the principals’ goals and visions for their schools to how principals and other leaders provided feedback to their teachers to specific actions that individual faculty took to get to know their students. Our questions focused on not only the formal, intended structures and policies in place but on principals’ and teachers’ actual practices. Sample questions included the following:

Example Principal Questions:

1.

What is your vision of student learning and instruction for this school?

2.

How often do you observe teachers’ instruction, either formally or informally?

a.

What type of feedback do you give after the observations?

b.

What do you see as the purposes of these observations?

3.

How often do you discuss professional needs and goals with your lead teachers?

4.

What opportunities are there for teachers to grow and learn as a teacher?

5.

What do you do to facilitate teachers getting to know their students as individuals?

6.

Can you tell me how you interact and connect with your students? How do you get to know your students as individuals?

Example Teacher Questions:

1.

How would you describe what the principal’s goals for this school are?

2.

To what extent do you think teachers in this school have common ideas about what students should be learning?

3. How often are you observed, either formally or informally?

a. What type of feedback do you get from the observations?

b. To what extent do you find these observations helpful to you?

4.

How often do you talk with school administrators about your professional needs or goals?

5.

What types of opportunities does the school provide for you to grow as a teacher?

6.

What are you doing to get to know your students as individuals?

By asking participants about what actually happened in different programs or meetings, we were able to identify how closely leaders’ and faculty members’ intended and actual practices matched. Our interviews with principals and teachers enabled us to corroborate evidence across participants to determine just how broadly certain practices or policies were followed and how engaged faculty members were in different programs in the school.

DATA ANALYSES

To anchor our work and inquiry around leadership practices and routines, we focused our study of high school leadership on the domains we summarized earlier, namely: a) creating personalizing learning connections, b) providing rigorous and aligned curriculum, c) developing high-quality instruction, and d) implementing systemic data use. Existing research indicates that such broader conditions and practices in schools are key to improving student learning (Goldring et al., 2009; Preston et al., 2012).

Our analyses focused first on how leaders work to develop positive personalized learning connections; that is, schools with personalization that targets both academic and social learning, where students feel strong connections to the school, both through classroom engagement and opportunities for involvement, and where these connections exist on a schoolwide level with specific social and academic structures in place to support the development of these connections.

We also examined leadership routines and practices of effective data use in terms of access to data, what capacity teachers have to use this data and act on what they learn from it (e.g., re-teach lessons, modify lessons based on student interim assessments), and whether there is a culture of data use in the school. We collected evidence of teachers’ use of a range of data, from in-class assessments to formative tests to end-of-course exams and grades. Our analyses did not focus on specific types of data but rather asked teachers to discuss what different data they analyzed and in what groups or processes during the school year.

Finally, in this study we examined schools’ work both to align their curricula with state standards and to provide rigorous curricula across different tracks for their students.

Interview transcripts were coded using pattern coding to identify instances of leadership across our four domains—personalized learning connections, data use, rigorous curriculum and quality instruction, with a focus on practices and routines (Fetterman, 1989; Miles & Huberman, 1994; Yin, 1989). Our analyses used a three-phase approach with multiple coders working together. Coding in Phase 1 was used to construct and refine our conceptualization of learning-centered leadership, identify qualitative dimensions of learning-centered leadership, and develop rubrics that helped coders determine the intensity, depth, or quality of the different components or subcomponents in each school. In Phase 2, we used the refined definitions and newly identified dimensions of learning-centered leadership to recode the transcripts originally coded during Phase 1 in order to build reliability between coders. The team of researchers met weekly to arbitrate their coding and come to consensus. In Phase 3, after achieving a satisfactory interrater reliability with a kappa value of .74, the triad of coders analyzed additional transcripts and observation notes, meeting weekly to share findings and discuss emerging themes. The researchers wrote memos throughout the coding process to elaborate their findings regarding the components and other themes that emerged (Corbin & Strauss, 2008) and to triangulate findings across different sources. These memos form the basis of this study and addressed the following questions:

1. How and to what degree are learning-centered leadership practices and routines around the four domains manifest (or absent) at each case study school?

2. What makes these schools unique as compared to the other schools?

3. What are the similarities and differences in learning-centered leadership practices and routines among the schools?

DISTRICT CONTEXT AND CASE STUDY HIGH SCHOOLS

In this section, we briefly profile the four case study schools. Table 1 provides demographic information and performance indicators for these four schools. We first discuss the district context and its influence on all the schools’ programs and policies before describing conditions in each of the schools.

Table 1. Demographic Characteristics and Performance Indicators of Case Study High Schools

	Low value-added schools		High value-added schools
	Boulder Star	Coral Reef		Key Lime	Loggerhead
School characteristics
Enrollment	1,600–2,000	1,900–2,300		2,600–3,000	2,000–2,400
Percent minority	55–65%	<20%		50–60%	65–75%
Percent economically disadvantaged	60–70%	45–55%		30–40%	45–55%
Percent limited English proficient	10–15%	5–10%		5–10%	5–10%
2010 graduation rate	<80%	<80%		>85%	>85%
2011 school grade2	C	A3		B	A

Note: The state accountability rating and graduation rate were the most recent data available at the time of school selection. Demographics represent the composition of the schools at the time of our visits (2010–2011). The value-added ranks are derived from 3 years of data of school-level value-added in math, science, and reading. The most recent year was 2009–2010.

DISTRICT CONTEXT

Broward County has been engaged in high school reform for the past 9 years and has received national recognition for its efforts to improve its chronically low-performing schools. Its high school reform goals include integrating an academic system with high standards, common curriculum and assessments across schools, and instructional supports for teachers. Specific strategies aimed toward achieving those goals include credit recovery programs, intensive skills classes, dual enrollment options for students, and weekend classes. In interviews in all four schools, faculty referenced a number of district policies or initiatives that influenced their work: the district’s common curriculum calendar that drove both content and timing of curriculum delivery, the centralized program to assign students to classes based on previous performance and test scores, an emphasis on the use of professional learning communities, an emphasis on more frequent classroom observations (brief “walkthroughs” or longer ones), and a focus during observations on classroom conditions such as common blackboard configurations (listing class goals and objectives), word walls, and the use of “do-now” activities to start lessons. While faculty in all four schools referenced these district policies, we found that school leaders implemented and supported these in different ways, and we focus on these differences. We next describe each of the schools (all referenced by pseudonyms) by offering brief summaries of their leadership structures, strategies for monitoring instruction, use of observation and student data, and students’ focus on learning.

BOULDER STAR HIGH SCHOOL: LOWER VALUE-ADDED

Over the last decade, Boulder Star’s grades in the Florida grading system have bounced from Cs to As, and during the 2010–2011 school year its grade had dipped to a C. This placed Boulder Star under “Correct II” status,⁴ which meant that it had been labeled a school in need of improvement for 4 or more years, had met less than 80% of adequate yearly progress (AYP) criteria in the previous year, and faced state-directed measures to improve student performance. With this status, it faced increased district and state oversight through closer monitoring of progress and support: if it did not make future progress and improve its school grade, it could also face state- and district-mandated schoolwide interventions.

The Boulder Star High School administrative team consists of the principal and four APs who meet once a week to plan for upcoming events, coordinate specific responsibilities, and schedule classroom observations and review prior data. APs are assigned to supervise 2–3 academic departments and individual grade levels (e.g., one AP focused on history, English/language arts, and ninth-grade students each year). A second leadership team, consisting of the principal, APs, department chairs, media specialist, Exceptional Student Education (ESE) specialist, and reading coach, meets every 2 weeks.

The principal commented that APs conduct most of the observations, which is corroborated by faculty reports, although the principal sometimes participates as well. The principal described these walkthroughs as the “backbone” of the school’s accountability efforts. For teachers, Boulder Star accountability encompasses discussing both observation data and student performance data in regular “3D Data Chats,” where administrators work with teachers to understand, interpret, and act on student data.

Faculty described a mixed culture of learning among students: a high level of academic focus among higher performing students (such as those in honors classes) but less academic focus among lower performing students in regular classes, marked by lack of engagement or unwillingness to do homework.

CORAL REEF HIGH SCHOOL: LOWER VALUE-ADDED

Over the last several years Coral Reef High School has bounced between C and D school grades, and during the 2010–2011 school year, it too was in a Correct II status under the state accountability system.

Coral Reef’s administrative team includes the principal and four APs, who meet once a week, and its leadership team consists of the principal and APs, department chairs, and four academic coaches from reading and math, who meet every two weeks and, among other activities, monitor walkthroughs. APs were assigned 2–3 subjects, and they supervised students based on last names, except for the ninth-graders, who were all supervised by one AP.

As at Boulder Star, Coral Reef faculty reported that administrators conduct brief, though sometimes irregular, classroom walkthroughs. Both of these schools’ teachers reported that walkthrough data were not presented individually but were used to discuss trends across multiple teachers that administrators observed. Coral Reef’s faculty reported that observation data and student performance data are used for a variety of purposes, but that there is a heavy emphasis on using this data for evaluation of teacher performance and accountability. Multiple teachers criticized administrators for offering little feedback after observations, and little support. Administrators also reported examining teachers’ grade books and test scores to hold them accountable, and the principal reported publicly posting student test scores for each teacher in an effort to motivate them to improve.

Faculty reported a weak sense of academic focus among students, where many students in Honors and AP classes are unprepared for the level of rigor and higher performing students in Honors and AP classes are marginalized. They described students as having problematic behavior and poor attendance, and they tended to attribute poor student performance to students’ backgrounds, poor prior performance, or lack of effort rather than their own instructional activities and strategies. Teachers were also highly critical of the principal’s offer of financial and field trip incentives to students to improve their performance on the FCAT because these offers were not actually followed through on for those students who improved.

KEY LIME HIGH SCHOOL: HIGHER VALUE-ADDED

This school has received an A over the past several years, and it is currently in Correct I status,⁵ which means that it had been labeled a school in need of improvement for 4 or more years, but met 80% of AYP criteria and faced district-directed (rather than state) intervention.

Its administrative team is similar to those at Boulder Star and Coral Reef, consisting of the principal and four APs who meet once a week. Its leadership team includes the principal, APs, department chairs, ESE coordinator, and team leaders from its small learning communities in science, social studies, and English/language arts. The team meets once every 2 weeks, and we saw evidence of input from informal leadership beyond departmental heads, including teacher leaders and curriculum leaders. APs and counselors are both assigned to “loop” with students, working with the same cohort of students as they progress through high school, instead of working with the same grade level every year as at Boulder Star and Coral Reef.

At Key Lime, teachers report receiving both formal and informal feedback on their performance from administrators and department chairs through annual reviews, classroom walkthroughs, and data chats with administrators and other faculty. While faculty have mixed feelings about the value of classroom walkthroughs, most teachers reported receiving useful feedback from performance reviews. In general, faculty report a high frequency of data use that is central to their practice.

Teachers reported that students in the AP/Honors track were extremely motivated both in and outside the classroom, while students in regular tracks had more problems with attendance, motivation, and behavior. Multiple teachers at Key Lime followed their comments about low behavioral engagement with descriptions of how certain school structures such as looping, small learning communities, or academic advising promote personalization and allow students to receive more individual attention from faculty over an extended period of time. We return to a discussion of leaders’ work with these structures below.

LOGGERHEAD HIGH SCHOOL: HIGHER VALUE-ADDED

Loggerhead’s school grade has bounced between an A and B over the past several years, and it was in Correct II status during the 2010–2011 school year.

The school’s leadership team consists of the principal and three APs, department chairs, team leaders, and instructional coaches, and this team meets once a week, but we did not see evidence of an administrative team as in the other schools. Similar to the other schools, APs are assigned to supervise both departments and individual grades, but as in the lower value-added schools, they do not loop with their students.

Faculty reported that administrators conduct regular classroom observations and hold quarterly discussions with teachers about their observations. Unlike the other three schools, faculty at Loggerhead characterized accountability as including test scores but emphasizing factors such as professional conduct, punctuality, specific instructional practices, and demonstrable concern for students—teachers and the principal both referenced these additional criteria. In addition to classroom observations, the principal reported observing teacher meetings as well as part of the accountability system.

Participants reported high expectations for faculty and adult actors in the school, but mixed expectations for students, specifically lower expectations for low-performing and/or low-SES students. Some faculty also reported their concerns about their own ability to meet the social and academic needs of the lowest performing students. In describing these concerns, however, many Loggerhead faculty identified student performance as a reflection of their own performance as instructors, while also expressing a need for parents and students to accept a greater share of the responsibility.

From these descriptions of leadership structures and processes, we turn to describing the differences between the intended and practiced routines of leadership in higher and lower value-added high schools.

RESULTS

We identified not only evidence of specific routines but how well their intended purposes matched their actual implementations. We found differences between these higher and lower value-added schools both in terms of leaders’ conceptions of the intended routines (those ideal policies that faculty are to carry out) and their attention to the implementation, through closer examination of faculty members’ actual actions or their directed support for faculty members’ practices. Our findings focus on two primary themes that characterize differences in the practices between lower and higher value-added high schools. First, leaders in higher value-added high schools for at-risk students are more involved in, intentional about, and attentive to how their ideal/intended routines are implemented, thus ensuring that teachers’ actual practices are changed. They focus on how these routines provide ongoing monitoring and feedback for their faculty to build and improve teachers’ quality instruction, alignment of curriculum, and systems of support for students. Second, higher value-added school leaders provided more targeted, systemic efforts to support personalized learning for students. We provide a series of contrasting cases, starting with lower and then moving to higher value-added schools, to illustrate and discuss how differences in principals’ practices cut across multiple programs to influence the extent and quality of their implementation. While these cases illustrate leadership differences in the two sets of schools we studied, we do not make the argument that these differences fully explain the range in student achievement and outcomes between the groups. As we discuss in the findings, our results highlight the need to further examine specific qualities in leaders’ work that may create school conditions that are more conducive to student success.

GREATER ATTENTION TO THE INTENDED AND PRACTICED ROUTINES THAT SUPPORT HIGH-QUALITY INSTRUCTION AND RIGOROUS, ALIGNED CURRICULUM

In higher value-added schools, we find evidence that leaders were more attentive to and involved in both the intended and practiced routines they used to support teachers’ instruction. This greater attention and involvement are evident through faculty discussions of school leaders’ more detailed conceptions of instruction and curriculum, intentions to support higher quality curriculum and instruction, and the higher priority leaders give to teacher observations by providing specific observational data and conferences to review those data.

Varying Conceptions of Leaders’ Intended Routines

In lower value-added schools (Boulder Star and Coral Reef), we found evidence for leaders’ more superficial understandings of what activities they needed to engage in to support teachers’ instruction and alignment of curriculum. When describing the content and focus of observations by administrators, Boulder Star’s principal reported that they focus on district-recommended strategies such as word walls and common blackboard configurations (such as listing class objectives), but he provided little beyond these descriptions of what was important to identify or analyze during observations. Teacher comments suggested they were unsure about leadership’s goals for instructional improvement and that leaders were looking for rote requirements in observations, rather than more substantive elements of strong instructional practice. One teacher expressed confusion regarding the specifics of the principal’s vision of learning and communication of priorities to staff.

I am not exactly sure what his particular goals are, like when it comes to figures and statistics. I know he wants us to start to really get the kids to pass the FCAT, more of the kids to pass the FCAT, because I think we were a little bit below last year. We weren’t making the standard. I don’t know what the standard is, how many kids are supposed to pass it within a school, but I think I was told that we weren’t making the standard. We need to raise the bar with our instruction on the FCAT.

As with Boulder Star, Coral Reef’s principal offered limited evidence of a more complex conceptualization of the ideal role that leaders needed to play in observing curriculum and instruction. The principal described administrators’ need to look for Marzano’s high-yield instructional strategies in their observations, but provided few, if any, further details or longer discussion regarding how recent district recommendations for instruction, such as bell-to-bell instruction and “do-now” or “bell-ringer” activities to start classes, are emphasized. Thus, while the principal offered key current catchphrases regarding the content of his observations (e.g., Marzano’s strategies), further discussions provided little, if any, evidence for a deeper understanding of strong instructional practice, and this suggested instead that leadership used a heavy emphasis on district-mandated observation priorities, like displaying objectives that are not always closely related to instruction. Multiple teachers questioned the value of the observations and feedback; the strongest evidence of a disconnect between leaders’ intended actions and their actual practices to support curriculum and instruction came from one teacher who commented that “lip service is paid to higher order thinking and high levels of thinking…(but) I’m not sure it’s supported… I think the attempt of what we want to do is there. I don’t think we are in sync with everyone doing what we should be doing.”

In contrast to Boulder Star and Coral Reef, multiple sources discuss administrators’ and department chairs’ roles in one of the higher value-added schools, Loggerhead High School, evidencing more complex conceptions of their intended practices to support quality instruction and rigorous curriculum. The fact that sources discuss more elaborate department chairs’ roles at Loggerhead is a key distinction from the lower value-added schools and is one avenue where administrators’ attention to practical steps and implementation is evident: department heads share in the responsibility for supporting instructional improvement. These comments illustrate leadership’s more detailed understanding of their roles as chairs to support teachers, rather than merely completing administrative work, such as course scheduling or distributing curricular materials to their departments. One Loggerhead department chair reported that she focuses on teachers who need help, such as new teachers who “don’t know how to teach,” and that she often helps teachers with “techniques to engage students.” She often determines which teachers need help by reviewing their lesson plans once a semester or by talking to APs to determine who needs additional help. A second department chair described herself as “the first line of defense” to provide help if she saw a struggling teacher. Loggerhead’s principal offered additional evidence of a more complex conception of teacher observations by elaborating how he looked for a “high level of rigor” comprised of “ambitious content, high cognitive demand that students are carrying” in their classes. Evidence from the Loggerhead High School principal and department chair interviews thus illustrates leaders’ more complex understanding of their formal, intended roles and routines to support instruction and curriculum.

Variations in Leaders’ Practiced Routines: Providing Specific Feedback to Guide Teachers’ Higher Quality Instruction

In regard to administrators’ observations and conferences with teachers, leaders in all four schools self-reported higher frequencies of observations than did their teachers, but teachers in higher value-added schools describe key differences in leaders’ practiced routines of following up on the observations, such as conferences/discussions and specific steps to provide support to teachers. First, leaders in higher value-added schools followed up more consistently with teachers to discuss the content of observations through conferences or brief meetings after their observations. Second, while participants in all four schools discussed having access to multiple forms of data (such as student achievement, attendance, and observation results), leaders in higher value-added schools provided more specific, actionable feedback for teachers to use to inform their own practice and improve student performance. In these, leaders use a wider range of data to give teachers more detailed evaluations and appraisals of their work, and they did so while encouraging faculty to engage in ongoing discussions of data around how to improve students’ performance and school conditions.

For example, at Boulder Star High School, multiple teachers testified to having numerous classroom walkthroughs and were broadly positive about these visits. However, when asked about provision of feedback or the use of data, leaders and teachers alike more frequently referred to the “3D Data” chats that APs led with groups of teachers every three 3, not to feedback from observations. They reported that feedback was primarily offered by leadership as various random issues arose or as part of the annual evaluation; this feedback is “minimal at best” according to one teacher. When pressed for more details on the content of the feedback and support that leaders provided, one Boulder Star teacher remained vague: “They support you. They give you a format. They give you the tools, and they are there for you. You have the knowledge, and they give you the—they give you, how do you say, the supplies that you need.” This view contrasts with administrators who report conducting frequent walkthroughs and giving “constant” feedback to their teachers about instruction, indicating that these intended routines may not have been as thoroughly implemented or practiced at Boulder Star. Taken together, these comments provide evidence of a number of conditions in low value-added schools: infrequent discussions with teachers, feedback that is nonspecific, references to few sources of data from observations, and a disparity between leadership’s and teachers’ views on the utility of walkthroughs and feedback.

Similarly, at Coral Reef High School, administrators described a process of classroom observations and feedback; however, teachers criticized them for providing little or no feedback after observations and little instructional support and instead being “concerned only with [test] scores.” One teacher focus group described receiving limited feedback or follow-through by administrators, such as providing professional development they recommended, again suggesting that instructional leadership routines remained at a formal or intended level in lower value-added schools. After one teacher commented that there was little follow-through to provide training to use more technology in the classroom that the principal had recommended, a second teacher replied, “at least you got feedback. I have never gotten feedback.” Only a few teachers discussed reviewing any data other than test scores with their administrators. Further, observations may only be occurring because walkthroughs are “forced by the district” and teachers reported that classroom walkthroughs were conducted on an intermittent basis. Administrators described providing informal feedback to teachers if they felt it was necessary, with no elaboration of goals for more consistent reviews or discussions.

In contrast, the leadership in higher value-added schools provided more consistent feedback and focused on data beyond just standardized test scores. At Key Lime High School, teachers reported receiving both formal and informal feedback on their performance from administration and department heads through annual reviews, more frequent classroom walkthroughs, data chats, and memos. While some teachers at Key Lime offered mixed accounts of the value and frequency of the shorter classroom walkthroughs, teachers primarily reported receiving useful feedback for their instruction from their performance reviews. Multiple teachers credited such feedback as informative for specific changes in their instruction during the year, and many described being engaged in meaningful, ongoing discussions of their student data throughout the year, in one-on-one meetings as well as in professional learning communities. At Loggerhead High School, administrators each year scheduled quarterly “one-on-one” data chats with teachers where they reviewed teachers’ student performance data, what they had seen in walkthroughs and longer observations, and their lesson plans, focusing more on factors such as professional conduct, punctuality, specific instructional practices, and demonstrable concern for students than on test scores. For leadership, multiple data sources were more useful in advising teachers’ practices and were key to making “a school click when it comes to performance outside.” Multiple department chairs also corroborated the timing and content of these quarterly one-on-one meetings, offering stronger evidence of a higher frequency of follow-up meetings at Loggerhead. One administrator detailed using both the data and follow-up conversations with teachers as guides for directing their department chairs and/or coaches to provide specific content or instructional support.

On the whole, we see evidence that leadership in higher value-added schools has more detailed conceptualizations of the observation and feedback cycle for their teachers and the importance of multiple forms of data that they can use in providing feedback to teachers. Furthermore, these intended routines translated into observations that have been implemented more widely and consistently. In lower value-added schools, leadership’s conceptualization of data use for instructional improvement is less developed, and the disconnects we found between leadership’s and teachers’ descriptions of the frequency of observation and feedback indicate that leadership may struggle to implement these routines in actuality. From here, we turn to the fourth essential component of focus, the role of leadership in promoting personalized learning connections.

TARGETED EFFORTS TO BUILD PERSONALIZED LEARNING CONNECTIONS WITH AND FOR STUDENTS

As previously summarized, the domain of personalized learning connections focuses on opportunities for teachers to provide more individual attention to students and discuss their unique experiences both in and out of school. Ranging from sports to extracurricular clubs and programs to in-class programs and lunchtime conversations, such activities allow adults to know their students more closely (Lee, Bryk, & Smith, 1993; Lee & Smith, 1999; McLaughlin, 1994) and to foster students’ sense of connection to the school (Walker & Greene, 2009).

Our analyses focused on evidence of leaders’ involvement in programs and practices aimed at developing these personalized learning connections, in an effort to identify how leaders’ guidance of or support for personalized connections differed between higher and lower value-added schools. The differences that we found centered on leaders’ careful attention to the broader routines that promote a larger number of adult-student connections: while leadership in lower value-added high schools more often emphasized their own or others’ individualized efforts to connect with students such as in lunchroom discussions, leaders in higher value-added schools more often discussed these connections by describing broader policies or programs they had implemented and maintained that helped to more systematically connect adults with students.  

Of the lower value-added schools, Boulder Star’s leadership offered more extensive evidence of leaders’ individualized strategies to promote connections. Boulder Star’s principal and one AP spent more time elaborating on how they made individual efforts to get “out and about” and talk with students in the halls and to participate in events such as dress-up days to help students see them in a different light. The AP commented on the importance of “being out there so students see me, knowing that we are just not people that sit in our office.” Other faculty members corroborated these accounts. One teacher described how the assistant principals had staged a “paint the AP” event during lunchtime to connect more with students. One of the APs described how the most important thing for her to do to ensure students’ success was

being their mother or father here on campus…It’s being an extension of what they may be getting here on campus, but a lot of times aren’t…students have to see you are human. They must understand you are a human being…You have to build that connection with your kids. I don’t know if it’s school-wide, I just think that would be more on an individual basis.

Coral Reef’s principal discussed efforts that also emphasized individual efforts to build relationships: he described his own work to be “visible” to students through conversations, along with his directions to APs to be in the hallways frequently. The principal described having started a mentoring program to target ninth- and tenth-graders in the lowest percentiles of performance and “personalize the experience” that different students have in school, but he offered few specifics for the program or any evidence that he or other leaders devoted much time to it, indicating that intended routines have not been translated into actual practice. An AP later reported that the program was gone due to budget cuts. When asked what administrators were doing to support better student connections, one department chair’s response suggested that some faculty saw little evidence that administrators were engaged due to their focus on accountability pressures:

Nothing. Nothing. Administration is so overwhelmed with this FCAT, and the school grade, and we got to up our scores with the AP kids, they don’t have time to make sure there is a connection. They are not doing it intentionally. They just don’t have the time. They don’t. I would say nothing. Then they wonder why attendance is going down. I tell them, why should a kid come to school every day if there is nothing else but preparing them for FCAT. That’s all we are talking about. We are not talking about pep rallies. We are not talking about having any activities, besides what’s in the textbook. We don’t have any guest speakers come out. We don’t have student assemblies. We don’t celebrate Women’s History month, Black History month, Jewish history…

Thus in these accounts from lower value-added schools, we not only see that school leaders focused on individualized strategies to build personalized connections with students, but we find evidence that these leaders may espouse certain intentions for building personal learning connections, but they did not enact or implement certain aspects of broader routines such as mentoring programs or school celebrations that could connect students more closely to their schools.

Evidence that administrators in lower value-added schools more often targeted individual practices to connect with students differed from evidence in the two higher value-added schools, where leaders and faculty indicated that school leaders focused on more systemic routines and programs to build student-adult connections. This focus on individuals developing relationships with students in lower value-added schools, rather than the systemic efforts we see in higher value-added schools, is similar to differences we see in the implementation of observational routines. In the lower value-added schools, principals and APs bear the primary responsibilities for observation, while in the higher value-added schools, responsibilities for observation are more distributed to include department heads as well.

Discussions with Key Lime’s principal (higher value-added) offer the strongest example of this. He first noted the centrality of these connections to the school’s success:

And, the reason we have made the A’s is because of the sense of personalization…They loop. 9th and 10th loop…An administrator, guidance counselor, and two academic teachers, an English and social studies teacher, are looping with these kids…So this whole idea– I keep coming back to personalization, knowing the kids, knowing their background, and creating a sense of family I think goes a long way.

He then detailed specific changes he had made for ninth and tenth grades so that students and teachers are together for more than one year, including modifications to the master class schedule, and co-locating administrative and counselor offices and classrooms for each grade level in the same area of the school: under his direction, formal, intended routines have actually been implemented. Other leaders are aware of the importance of these looping structures as well: one AP spoke of refining looping so that staff connect with both parents and their students: “all of us rotate and stay with a cohort of kids until they graduate, this is to increase the level of personalization not only with the students, but the parents as well.” Faculty also value these looping structures and describe the impacts of them, together with the resource modifications necessary for their implementation. One teacher echoed how these small learning communities were central to the school’s success:

I find them critical to our success here…Speaking about the strength (of the school) question, I would be remiss if I didn’t mention that the way that we personalize education here I think is amazing. There is the sense of community here that is palpable. You can feel it.

Comments by other faculty highlighted the importance of different programs to connecting with students: “On campus, we have a lot of clubs and that’s important to students because they have that teacher—they have asked that teacher, that they have a relationship with, to be their club sponsor, so they get exposed to being with a teacher other than teaching. So they see the interaction, normal interaction.”

Loggerhead High School also used looping, and a reading program established with their feeder middle school provides stronger evidence of the faculty’s systematic efforts to connect with their students. The principal detailed how faculty visited their feeder middle schools to meet incoming freshmen as eighth graders, to introduce the school, and to invite them to participate in a reading program in which they meet in smaller groups during their freshman year to discuss a book. Efforts such as these helped faculty to make early connections with incoming students. The principal and one AP also described a program in which administrators and teachers worked together throughout the year to identify particular student groups (e.g., those in the lowest 30% of achievement or those with excessive absences) and meet with these groups to discuss both their academic work as well as their personal experiences at the school and life issues they may be confronting. When explaining the motivation behind the program, the AP explained it was due to “Personalization. Day in and day out personalization.” Finally, administrators at Loggerhead elaborated on how a lead content teacher had engaged students in this more systemic approach to personalization and school connections by working closely with the student government to brainstorm and provide opportunities such as guest speakers and pep rallies during lunch and after school for other students and faculty to come together to build school spirit. These efforts served to both engage students in developing the programs and provide other students with activities to feel more a part of the school.

DISCUSSION

This paper has examined the notion that leadership in effective high schools is defined by engaging in and supporting articulated routines and practices that are pervasive and permeate all aspects of the school, rather than the implementation of any particular set of programs (such as ninth-grade academies). Our findings highlight leadership work by multiple actors to improve instruction and learning. Our analyses of learning-centered leadership highlighted data relating to traditional leaders’ (principals and APs) as well as other leaders’ (e.g., department chairs, teacher leaders) practices within their schools. By considering leadership in terms of intended actions and policies as well as others’ discussions of actual or performative actions and policies, we were able to look beyond leaders’ own descriptions of their roles and practices to examine others’ accounts of what strategies and/or practices actually helped distinguish leadership in more and less effective schools. We present evidence that in higher value-added high schools, leaders’ practices and routines were better matched to their intentions to support their faculty’s practices in quality instruction, systematic use of data, rigorous and aligned curriculum, and building personalized learning connections.

As we have discussed, leaders in higher value-added high schools differed from their counterparts in lower value-added high schools in three key ways. First, they described more complex conceptions of their own intended roles of observation and feedback to support teachers’ quality instruction. These leaders provided more detailed summaries of what they looked for in their observations and what information they provided in their feedback. Teachers’ comments in both sets of schools corroborated these accounts: those in higher value-added schools reported how leaders’ input had led to changes or improvements in their instruction, while some in lower value-added schools questioned the value of leaders’ feedback.

Second, leaders in higher value-added schools exhibited systemic data use practices that involved a wide variety of data and had become ingrained routines (Ingram et al., 2004; Schildkamp & Visscher, 2010; Spillane, 2012). They used multiple forms of data to provide more frequent, specific feedback and to engage teachers in ongoing reviews and discussions of their students’ progress. In this domain we found evidence of how leaders in higher value-added schools combined the data analyses with data from observations to create more coherent, ongoing discussions about instruction that included both group or team reviews of data along with their individual feedback to teachers.

Finally, leaders in higher value-added high schools focused on establishing more systemic routines in the forms of broader programs and systems (such as looping, a freshman reading program, club activities) that provided greater, more widespread opportunities for faculty to build personalized learning connections. Their focus on these routines included attention to various resources (such as location of classrooms or administrator offices) that helped to ensure that the programs had an impact on teachers’ interactions with one another and with students, all around the shared goal of connecting with their students. In effect, higher value-added school leaders’ careful attention to implementation of the formal, intended routines and details of the personalized learning connections initiatives helped to change teachers’ routines such that they actually did connect more frequently with students on topics that included both academics and broader topics (such as club activities), increasing students’ likelihood of graduation (Crosnoe et al., 2004; Peck, Roeser, Zarrett, & Eccles, 2008). This evidence came in the form of both leaders’ discussions of the programs and teachers’ description of more frequent engagement with individual students through those programs.

Across the four domains of schooling that were the focus of this paper—quality instruction, rigorous and aligned curriculum, systemic use of data, and personalized learning connections—we find evidence that leaders’ careful attention to the planned routines in higher value-added schools often helped to ensure that they are carried out and enacted with more fidelity by faculty—staff’s actual changes in practices more closely matched the intended changes. Our findings illustrate that a deeper understanding of leaders’ work to support key routines in their schools, when analyzed to compare their intended and actual implementation rather than viewed as discrete practices (Feldman & Pentland, 2003; Spillane et al., 2011 and 2012), can help to identify how their more detailed conceptions of their responsibilities and roles both inform their own actions as well as the routines and programs that they implement. Instead of referring broadly to district mandates, leaders in the higher value-added schools emphasized the value of program and policy details for success, and they made these more explicit for staff in setting expectations and following up on implementation. This paper also demonstrates the importance of further examining both the intentions and actual implementations of organizational routines to determine their success when studying school improvement. Analyses such as these not only help to determine just how new programs or policies affect leadership practice, such as day-to-day instruction or time spent connecting with students more personally, but they reveal that school leaders’ deliberate attention to routines, such as use of data, can influence multiple areas of school effectiveness.

Our findings also inform the larger field of high school improvement in a number of ways. Just as the results emphasize the need to pay attention to the formal or intended dimensions of routines, they also point to the need to examine the actual implementation of different programs such as career academies, ninth grade academies, or AVID. In this study’s higher value-added high schools, leaders’ practices helped to ensure both greater alignment of staff resources (time and materials) around specific goals such as building personalized learning connections, and they more closely supported improvements in teachers’ practices (through such actions as giving more detailed feedback on instruction). Such practices by effective leaders could certainly apply not only to specific routines but also to implementation of broader programs and/or comprehensive school reform models. These findings point to the key roles that principals can play in not only aligning and connecting different resources in their schools but also in providing guided support of teachers’ changes to or improvements of their practices.

These results also point to the need for refining our understanding of just what specific leadership practices matter most in improving student achievement in high schools. Grissom, Loeb, and Master (2013) have found that specific practices such as teacher coaching, evaluation, and developing a school’s educational program positively predict achievement gains, while principals’ time spent on brief, informal classroom walkthroughs may actually be negatively associated with achievement gains. They call for more study and definition of what specifically comprises effective instructional leadership in different contexts. Similarly, teachers in our higher value-added schools described their principals’ more detailed provision of useful feedback to inform and guide their improved practices; these results offer support for Grissom et al.’s findings that principals must connect their observations and walkthroughs to longer discussions and a coherent vision for improved instruction.

Finally, Horng et al. (2010) present evidence that other organizational management work (e.g., hiring personnel, managing budgets and resources) is key to raising student achievement in high schools. These activities fall outside of more recent conceptualizations of instructional leadership and point to the broader organizational roles that principals play in their schools. Similarly, we found that principals’ careful allocation and alignment of resources were key to the success of programs (for such priorities as improving personalized learning connections), and such work falls outside the scope of recent calls for principals to focus heavily on the teaching and learning dimensions of their schools. As the field deepens its understanding of effective school leadership, there is a need to develop both more specific conceptions of instructional leadership practices as well as broader views of the systemic impacts that principals can have on their schools.

Notes

1. Identifying reference provides additional technical detail on the specific value-added model and the selection criteria for these high schools.

2. 2010–2011 Florida School grades for high schools are derived from a combination of FCAT scores, learning gains, graduation rates, accelerated coursework, and SAT/ACT scores. Yearly guides to calculating school grades are available from http://schoolgrades.fldoe.org/reports/.

3. Because school grades include a wide variety of metrics and are largely driven by achievement levels and graduation rates rather than growth, school grades and value-added measures are not strongly correlated. Additionally, to meet the criteria for an “A” grade, a school must only achieve 62% of the available points.

4. Correct II status indicates that the school has a grade of at least C, has not made adequate yearly progress (AYP) for more than 4 preceding years in a row, and met less than 80% of its AYP criteria in the previous school year.

5. Correct I status indicates that the school has a grade of at least C, has not made AYP for more than 4 preceding years in a row, but met at least 80% of its AYP criteria in the previous school year.

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Cite This Article as: Teachers College Record Volume 120 Number 9, 2018, p. 1-38 https://www.tcrecord.org ID Number: 22343, Date Accessed: 9/20/2019 4:10:59 PM

by Alan J. Daly, Yi-Hwa Liou, Miguel Del Fresno, Martin Rehm & Peter Bjorklund Jr. – 2019

Leadership is one of the most examined concepts in the literature, and while the study of social networks is also gaining interest, the intersection between leadership and online social networks has received limited attention. The key notion underlying most leadership research is that the behaviors or attributes of a leader matter for a variety of outcomes. While offering valuable insights, this dominant view of leadership behavior and attributes underestimates the impact of social networks. Scholars are increasingly recognizing the importance of social processes involved in leading. Leadership has often been conceptualized as a process of influence toward an outcome. Social relationships through networks may provide leaders with the necessary infrastructure to access resources in achieving outcomes. Leadership from a network perspective emphasizes the interdependence reflected by a network of ties, which may ultimately moderate, influence, or determine the activity and movement of practices and knowledge.

We live in an increasingly connected and interconnected world with the production and dissemination of meaning mediated not only by professional media—such as news media (CNN, Fox, etc.) and newspapers (TheNew York Times, The Wall Street Journal)—but also through social media users and accompanying platforms. Social media has disrupted more formal media channels; this vast network of complex interactions between individuals and technological infrastructure, such as Twitter (www.twitter.com), has created a new communication space. This new space can both support and constrain interactions as well as the flows of resources (ideas, information, practices, opinions, etc.) between and among individuals as they act, interact, and understand in this new environment. This new information space is important because we know that the quantity and quality of information we can access as individuals are key influencers on the ways in which we perceive, understand, decide, and act in both personal and professional spaces. Social media has facilitated the emergence of audiences with the ability and capacity to be generators, senders, and receivers of information and knowledge. In essence, this micromedia has spawned a new generation of communication and interaction that is unmatched by previous models of interaction and, as such, provides an interesting new space for exploration. 

Social media exemplifies the extraordinary capacity of people to generate, spread, and exchange ideas, information, and opinions through interpersonal, collective communication within a massive socially networked system. Social media can be organized into multiple general categories: platforms of socialnetworking (Facebook, LinkedIn), microblogging (Twitter, Weibo), photography (Flickr, Instagram, Pinterest), video (YouTube, Vimeo, MetaCafe), social news (Meneame, Digg, Reddit), direct streaming (Livecast, Ustream), social gaming (World of Craft), bookmarking (Delicious, StumbleUpon), blogs (WordPress, Blogger), and so son. Social media has become a source of large-scale “big data” that is constantly being produced and offers opportunities and challenges to researchers and users alike. It is not so much the “bigness” of the data that presents new opportunities, but that the data reflect a much larger interconnected and complex social system that requires new tools for analysis. 

Despite the growth in the social media space (Perrin, 2015), our knowledge about this area and its relationship to educational practice is growing but limited (Greenhow & Askari, 2017; Greenhow, Cho, Dennen, & Fishman, 2019, this yearbook). Previous work with social networks and social media suggests a process of influence and opportunities for professional exchanges (Del Fresno, Daly, & Segado Sánchez-Cabezudo, 2016). Individuals in online communities may interact with others who share similar interests, or ask questions or share answers to inquiries (Wellman, 2004). Educators in these virtual spaces also share resources, discuss current instructional challenges, and share new opportunities and materials (Hu, Torphy, & Opperman, 2019, this yearbook; Hu, Torphy, Opperman, Jansen, & Lo, 2018). Social media is increasingly a source of information and resources for educators and has the potential to be instrumental in changing the ways in which teachers approach their teaching and shape beliefs (National Council of Supervisors of Mathematics, 2015). Teachers will often access social media sites such as Twitter and Pinterest, for example, as specific spaces to explore and find instructional resources (Opfer, Kaufman, & Thompson, 2016) and to address specific instructional needs. However, despite a growing body of work in the teacher space, we lack an empirical base for educational leaders. In fact, we know very little about the spaces where educational leaders may visit the practices, tools, and resources within their virtual networks, and who the influential actors and communities are. It is this gap in our knowledge that animates this chapter and our subsequent work. 

EDUCATIONAL LEADERSHIP

Educational leadership is a broad topic and can incorporate individuals who hold formal positions in the education system, such as school and district administrators, but it can also take the form of teachers on special assignment, grade-level and department chairs, and other teacher leaders. In addition, a set of individuals also play more “informal” leadership roles, such as those sought for advice or input or who are highly active in other types of communities, such as virtual networks. For our work, we are bounding the population of “educational leaders” in two ways. The first is the universe of individuals who are interacting around key leadership hashtags on Twitter that we have identified. This bounding reflects a way to explore the leadership space in the broadest sense and goes beyond title and position. The second group of educational leaders are those who occupy formal positions (school and district administrators) and whom we will examine at a greater level of precision. 

We focus on educational leaders both broadly and narrowly conceptualized because these individuals are typically instrumental to the functioning of systems, districts, and schools. They are often setting direction, framing efforts, and influencing opinions (Leithwood & Riehl, 2003). Moreover, these individuals are often responsible for leading the implementation of change and creating positive working and learning environments for systems, districts, and schools to meet objectives (Bryk & Schneider, 2002; Holme & Rangel, 2012; Tschannen-Moran, 2014). From our vantage point, it is not just their actions in physical locations, such as schools, but in wider social networks that may play integral roles in shaping decisions, moving important resources, and supporting their ability to enact reforms (Finnigan & Daly, 2010; Penuel, Frank, & Krause, 2010). We argue that networks in a broad sense (both online and offline) are important spaces to understanding how the work of leadership gets done. In meeting this goal, we argue for the importance of attending to the social side of educational leadership. In making our case, we first provide a general overview of a social network approach, the role of the “social” in educational leadership, and an example of a pilot test in a education-related space with teachers, which sets up the presentation of early results from our first foray into the educational leader virtual space. 

SOCIAL NETWORK THEORY AND PERSPECTIVE

Traditional social science research focuses on individuals as autonomous units separate from relationships and contexts (Wasserman & Faust, 1994). It approaches research and analysis by examining the traits and attributes of individual actors (Borgatti & Ofem, 2010; Wasserman & Faust, 1994). Social network theory instead focuses on the relationships between actors and “takes into account the web of relationships in which actors are embedded that both constrain and provide opportunities” (Borgatti & Ofem, 2010, p.18). This approach allows us to explore and analyze the power of relationships—both face-to-face and virtual—in education spaces. In social network theory, networks consist of people or actors who are connected by relationships or ties to one another. Additionally, different types of ties serve distinct purposes: bonding and bridging ties. Bonding ties are those that form groups within networks and are generally thought of as strong ties, whereas bridging ties (also known as brokerage ties) are relations that connect discrete or sparsely connected groups and are often understood as weak ties. Both types of ties offer different information flows and resource allocation, discussed more later.

A core tenet of social network theory is the idea that an actor’s structural position in the network determines information flows and outcomes for that actor (Borgatti & Ofem, 2010). People with more ties are considered to have a more central position in the network. Actors who have more out-going ties (or out-degree centrality) and in-coming ties (in-degree centrality) are more central to the network structure and those with lower in-degree and out-degree centrality tend to be more peripheral to the network. People who connect disparate groups (or brokers) also wield structurally important positions in the network because they are crucial for information flow and serve as connectors between groups. Having a base understanding of network theory sets the stage for the larger argument we make about the role of the “social work” in educational leadership explored later. 

EDUCATIONAL LEADERSHIP AND SOCIAL SPACE

Leadership is one of the most examined concepts in the social science literature. While the study of social networks in educational leadership has also gained interest in recent years (e.g., Daly & Finnigan, 2010; Pitts & Spillane, 2009), the intersection between leadership and social networks in both virtual and face-to-face spaces has received limited attention. The key notion underlying most leadership research is that the behaviors or attributes of a leader matter for a variety of outcomes. While offering valuable insights into the role of an individual leader in enhancing outcomes, this dominant view of leadership behaviors and attributes may underestimate the social setting and networks in which leaders are embedded. 

Scholars who examine leadership are increasingly recognizing the importance of social processes and relational linkages involved in leading (Daly, 2010). Leadership in its broadest sense has often been conceptualized as a process of influence toward an outcome. Social relationships through networks, therefore, may provide leaders with the necessary infrastructure to exert social influence in achieving individual and organizational goals, such as implementing reforms or improving student outcomes (Liou, Daly, Brown, & Del Fresno, 2015). A social network perspective places leadership directly in the role of a social undertaking. Leadership from a network perspective emphasizes the interdependence of action that is reflected by a network of social ties that ultimately moderates, influences, and even determines the direction, speed, and depth of a planned activity and movement of resources such as practices, tools, knowledge, and information. 

Often resources—such as information, practices, expertise, or innovation—that reside in a system are a result of building human capital, which comprises the knowledge, skills, and abilities of individuals within a school system, for instance (Becker, 1964). In addition, the resources that stem from human capital can also be derived from the social relationships among organizational members. Social capital is concerned with the resources that exist in relations between individuals. In essence, social capital theorists argue that it is the ties between individuals that create a social network structure, which in turn, supports or constrains the distribution of resources (Lin, 2001). Connections and access, or a lack thereof, to available resources (such as expertise) situate leaders in social structural positions that enable more or less influence, access, and ability to move resources.

The transfer of resources in any educational system may be influenced by the quantity and quality of ties between leaders. The content of the network (i.e., what flows between actors) defines the purpose of the network and, in turn, the resulting structure. For example, the social structure of a work-related principal expertise network may differ significantly from the structure of a more normative social network, such as friendship. In both examples, resources flow through ties (the first being expertise, and the second, friendship), but the overall structure of the network may look quite different. A number of studies have indicated that educational leaders who have ties across systems—for example, school districts—often measured by quantity (how frequently the interaction occurs) or quality (how “strong” the interaction is) have been found to be able to better transfer tacit, nonroutine, or complex knowledge, facilitate joint problem solving, and stimulate the development of coordinated and innovative solutions and high-quality approaches that may be associated with better outcomes (Daly, Liou, & Brown, 2016). In contrast, through weak ties (e.g., weak social connections like acquaintances), a leader may find opportunities to broker or connect actors to provide access to nonredundant and novel information, practices, or tools. 

As mentioned earlier, bonding and bridging are two specific types of ties that provide a principal with access to useful resources. The term bonding ties generally refers to those ties between actors within a network that directly connect actors and, as such, form close-knit groups. Bonding ties typically occur within an actor’s own network and tend to be stronger and more frequent. Bridging ties (or brokerage ties) are those relations between actors, groups, and organizations that are not well connected. Bridging ties span “structural holes,” or those areas of a network that are not connected and, as such, provide access to novel information (Burt, 2005). Both types of ties—bonding for the transfer of complex information and bridging for nonredundant, novel information—have been shown to facilitate different types of action in meeting outcomes. 

EDUCATIONAL LEADERSHIP AND SOCIAL STRUCTURE

A leader’s position in the social network structure has been shown to be consequential, because network position may provide better access to and monitoring of resources such as tools and practices (Daly & Finnigan, 2010). Networks serve administrators in moving resources not only toward them but also out to others. Network scholars have suggested that the network in which a principal is situated can provide, filter, and distort information coming in, but simultaneously, the network also directs and concentrates information about the principal out to the system (Daly, 2012). Therefore, the social network in which an educational leader is embedded both diffuses resources in and disperses information out about that leader. 

A key determinant of the structural advantage of a leader’s position in a social system is individual centrality in the network. Different types of centrality can be inferred from a leader’s structural position relative to others in a social network. We will discuss two types of centrality that are mostly used to determine the positional advantages of actors in network scholarship: degree centrality and betweenness centrality. 

A leader’s total degree centrality is defined in terms of the relative number of connections that leader has to others in the network and reflects the total number of individuals who seek out that person and whom that person seeks out for a specific relationship—for instance, advice. The more a leader is sought (being sought for a resource like “advice” reflects a type of “popularity” in the network) in the network, the higher that person’s in-degree centrality. Higher in-degree centrality indicates that the leader is more centrally positioned in the network and, as such, has disproportionate influence on what flows within a system. This places a highly central leader in a more “dominant” role than other leaders within that network. Alternatively, seeking resources such as friendship is referred to as out-degree centrality. Those individuals who engage in relatively higher seeking behaviors are also considered central and potentially influential. 

Highly central leaders have increased influence over the network in which they are situated because of access to multiple resources and the potential to create new linkages, which may further enhance their access to resources (Borgatti, 2005). Having more relationships increases a leader’s opportunities to access diverse, novel resources such as expertise, tools, and practices, and amass those resources. Those leaders who are less central may receive fewer resources and do not have as many opportunities to benefit from the resources held by those in more central positions (Daly, 2012). Moreover, less central leaders usually receive or access only the resources deemed necessary by those in centralized positions, thus restricting their perspective of the overall organization. This idea suggests that central individuals are situated to wield more social influence than are their less connected peers.

By occupying a more central position, a leader may be considered a key influencer or opinion leader because this individual is more often sought for resources (practices, expertise, knowledge, information, etc.) and has easier access to ideas, knowledge, and/or support from a social network (Liou & Daly, 2018). This access to diverse resources provides a central leader or his or her organization with the possibility to guide, control, and even broker the flow of information and resources within a network and, as such, may have disproportionate influence over the system. A leader may use the power and status attained through occupying a central position to direct certain knowledge and information and potentially “block” the flow of resources, making it important to identify these key influencers and opinion leaders because these roles may have important consequential effects on diffusion of resources in a social system. 

Another often-used type of centrality in leadership studies is betweenness centrality. Betweenness centrality refers to an actor’s potential to “broker” relationships, in effect controlling the flow of resources between two otherwise disconnected actors (Daly, Finnigan, Jordan, Moolenaar, & Jing, 2014). Betweenness is assessed as the number of times an actor is positioned “in between” two people in the network who are themselves disconnected. Actors with high betweenness are often perceived by others as being in positions of social power because they bridge otherwise disconnected parts of the networks. Educational leaders with high betweenness may benefit a network by connecting disconnected groups, or cliques, but also have a very strategic, influential, and potentially disruptive position because they can “choose” whether to diffuse resources between disconnected (groups of) individuals. High betweenness has also been conceptualized as representing a position of “power” given the individual’s ability to control the flow and content of resources (Burt, 2005). However, this network position of power may potentially negatively affect the distribution of information, knowledge, and innovation, given their role of gatekeeper in diffusing information. In this investment, we are interested in multiple forms of influence and identifying key influencers. 

Network studies have demonstrated that a leader’s network centrality is related to important outcomes. For example, a leader’s centrality in external and internal expertise networks has been associated with objective measures of group performance, effectiveness, and reputation (Mehra, Dixon, Brass, & Robertson, 2006). Recent research explored the role of a principal’s social network position in relation to transformational leadership behavior and innovative climates in organizations. Findings indicated that the more often a principal was sought for advice, the more the organization was characterized by an innovative climate (Moolenaar, Daly, & Sleegers, 2010). Related work also suggests that leadership is often distributed across multiple actors, and informal leaders play important and expanding roles in meeting outcomes (Spillane & Kim, 2012). The balance of this early work suggests that educational leadership is often distributed across formal and informal leaders and as such may enhance the flow of information, knowledge, expertise, and practices. Leadership distributed through a network may also support the formation of communities of practice and as such facilitate organizational processes and outcomes at the organizational, individual, and student levels. However, given our slowly growing knowledge in this space, we have a very limited empirical base on which to draw, particularly as we look at both online and offline networks and how they intersect around the work of educational leaders. To better understand the potential of this space, we undertook a pilot study of teachers in order to test out what has previously been explored around networks and educators and to hone our analytic approach for our interest in examining educational leadership.  

PREVIOUS PROOF OF CONCEPT WORK

In this section, we offer some preliminary propositions that arose out of our 18-month pilot work in Twitter examining a large virtual teacher network (Teacher2Teacher) comprising approximately 40,000 unique actors (Daly & Del Fresno, 2019). This work is under review, but we share it here because our primary goal in the Teacher2Teacher work was to test out our analytic approach, specialized technology, and to explore the degree to which work in this space reflects a viable undertaking.¹ We chose Twitter as a vehicle for this work because Twitter is a global and free online social media platform where users write short messages with limited characters, known as tweets, which are sent to all who have opted to receive the tweets of the writer (followers). When posting a tweet (via the Web, text, computer, tablet, or a smartphone), it is possible to add more than text; you can also include images, links, and hashtags (a word or phrase prefixed by the symbol # that turns them into metadata). Currently, Twitter is the fastest, simplest, and cheapest social media platform where there is a flow of all types of information, news, ideas, events, rumors, multimedia, and so on, created by users and moved quickly. This combines to make Twitter a privileged field for research because it is a type of “central nervous system” of the Internet and lends itself to research related to social network structure (Del Fresno, 2014).

Applying social network theory to our pilot work suggested eight general propositions that we will continue to explore both in the ongoing teacher work and in our new educational leadership study. We offer these eight propositions as a way to ground our work and illustrate some potential rich areas of exploration. 

1. The virtual world can be socially mapped and measured to provide insights and action. This idea is perhaps both the most obvious and important. Virtual networks are not just massive chaotic systems with individuals randomly engaging (although there is some of this happening); there is some underlying social structure that emerges over time or at a single time point and can be measured through metrics and visualized. The network perspective offers a multilevel view from an entire network, to subcommunities, to individual actors. From this work, we have seen the rise and fall of a variety of key influencers, the development of communities and subcommunities, an increasing level of social activity, and a diverse and significant amount of content flowing between actors.

2. Content, practices, and ideas flow through social media. The argument guiding our work is that social media provides the “backbone” for the Internet as a place for all types of media, links, ideas, opinions, and tools to be moved in a network. Social media in general, and Twitter in particular, is accelerating and making teacher networks increasingly dense as educators seek communities to address problems of practice and share insights, materials, and tools. We saw evidence of content, practices, and ideas flowing from actor to actor within the network through a social infrastructure supported by social media. Because Twitter represents the intersection of media and medium, it has provided an excellent field work “site” for research, communication, and interaction. 

3. Virtual networks are dynamic, grow, and evolve over time. The teacher network was dynamic and attracted new actors over time. The volume of the network expanded, as did the number of actors, and provided a deep, rich, and varied community. A “community” is a set of actors who interact more with each other than with other actors outside their group. We noted changes in structures and the development of subcommunities during the course of our pilot study. These subcommunities were distinct communities, with their members tending to interact more with each other than with other community members. It is important to note that we did not take an a priori approach to identifying communities; we “observed” the social behavior (Twitter activity) of actors in the network and let that guide the determination of what constituted a community, as opposed to imposing our organizing strategy on the data. Communities arose organically and were not necessarily formally organized from external sources, such as on-ground organizations. Although there were some consistent key actors, we also saw the rise of other influencers and the decline of others who were key at one point and became less so over time. 

4. Move toward more inclusivity and interconnectivity stemming from a central core. Although we did identify unique communities, we also noted that over time, there was a movement from isolated actors and communities to a more interconnected set of communities. It appeared that the teacher network provided a bonding, bridging, and attracting function because it provided a central core with which actors and communities were able to connect. In essence, although there were communities aligned to distinct school districts, for instance, these divisions were less clear over time, with more interconnections between communities being created. The growing nature of the communities provided opportunities for engagement and empowerment, and reduced the isolated action of small cliques or groups. The central core of the network expanded as a number of new hashtags were added over time. 

5. Networks evolve and become more robust with targeted focus. Social network approaches and methods enabled us to identify key influencers—that is, people who are central to the network and/or have control over the flow information or messaging. Better understanding the lay of the virtual land may enable networks to be more efficient in launching and supporting communication campaigns or the movement of relevant resources through networks. Given limited resources available to influence network growth, knowing how, when, and with whom to deploy resources is key in making the highest impact and scaling practices and information of interest. 

6. Influence goes beyond number of followers, and influence roles differ. We were able to identify key influencers in the teacher network from four different perspectives— Transceivers (high in-degree), Transmitters (high out-degree), Transcenders (high in- and out-degree), and Traders (high betweenness/brokering). These influencers differ from more traditional influence models that others put forth, such as attending to the number of followers, which is a narrowly focused way of defining influence. Influencers in this work were identified by “observing” their activity in a social space, meaning incoming and outgoing ties with others. This type of approach is not reliant on self-report or the gathering of followers, but is based on observation and measurement over time. In fact, it was rarely the case that those who had the largest number of followers were also influencers in a social network sense. In other words, network measures can provide different insights that may complement existing measures of influence. Moreover, we were also able to drill down into specific roles (particularly around brokers) to identify and profile different types of bridging actors within the large category of brokering and offer a more nuanced delineation of influencers. 

7. Online and offline spaces interact and intersect. One of the more interesting findings that came out of this teacher work suggested that individual educators within school districts were interacting in virtual space. This suggests that online and on-ground worlds interacted, creating an educational social continuum where the movement between online and offline is much more fluid than may have been considered. 

8. Not all hashtags are equal and obvious. Although we started out with a key set of hashtags and search terms, the number of identified hashtags of interest grew significantly over time to include a large pool. This finding indicated that there was a much broader set of interactions than we first realized and that we were capturing an increasingly growing and interconnected data pool. Moreover, although the key hashtags we identified did show up in the analysis, others that were not previously noted ended up being highly active and, as such, a good source of information. This is one of the most important findings in this work; there is much in the social media and network space that remains hidden in plain sight, and our ability to “predict” the size of the network or even the most key and active features such as hashtags may not be as accurate as we first believed. Our decisions as researchers studying the space may not be as effective as we had hoped. Casting a wider net on the network may enable us to better capture the complexity and portray a more accurate picture of the space. 

In short, our work from this pilot project indicates that virtual networks can be mapped, analyzed, and utilized; they are dynamic and formed around issues and influential actors; and the lines between the online and offline networks are not clear and often intersect (Hashim & Carpenter, 2019, this yearbook). This social media pilot work and set of propositions in the teacher space set the stage for adding the important and understudied area of educational leadership: How do leadership networks form and grow over time? Who are the influencers in these networks, and how can they be leveraged? What are the intersections of the offline and online networks? These questions offer a host of opportunities for future research and practice, as we outline next and offer some early preliminary data.

THE RESEARCH AND PRACTICE OPPORTUNITY

The previous sections argue for the social side of leadership, the importance of examining educational leadership from a social network perspective, and some general propositions from our pilot work. As we argue, the role of educational leadership has become increasingly important in the process of educational improvement, and change and is often touted as critical in the work of network improvement communities but is far less examined. Although other aspects of the educational endeavor have been explored in the network community space (e.g., teacher networks), we still have a dearth of work that examines the role of educational leaders, particularly in terms of accessing and leveraging virtual and face-to-face networks around high-quality practices, tools, and approaches. Given the changing workplace of education, educational leaders, particularly principals, need to continuously adapt and update their identity, knowledge, and skills to meet the challenges of their everyday work, particularly in new virtual spaces (Cho & Jimerson, 2017). 

In realizing the goal of meeting complex educational challenges, high-quality, sustained, and relevant leadership professional development has been recognized as a key factor that can contribute to this development and change. Although some formal development opportunities are in place for educational leaders, they do not always seem to fit the needs and requirements of leaders and their unique contexts. As a result, leaders are increasingly searching for, and depending on, (informal) networks to engage in discussions, share relevant and high-quality resources, and further enhance their knowledge and practices.

A growing body of research around leadership and networks outlined earlier shows that these more informal social ecosystems in which resources like practices, tools, and approaches move are consequential to access, use, and diffusion of these resources and their relationship to outcomes (Daly, Del Fresno, & Supovitz, 2019). Although we have some work on the role of informal networks of educational leaders and their relationship to other leaders from face-to-face networks (see Daly, 2010), the role of online spaces/social media for educational leaders has not been as carefully examined at scale. The limited studies that have been completed around school leaders in online spaces suggest that educational leaders use online networks for forming communities of practice, which is critical given the typical professional isolation of school leaders (Carpenter & Krutka, 2014). Within these communities, leaders draw on connections primarily for educational purposes, suggesting that school leaders use social media connections for professional exchanges much more than does the general public. 

Social media, as a growing body of research is suggesting, is becoming increasingly more important for (informal) professional development for educators, particularly for educational leaders, who often do not have access to more formalized forms of professional development or “just-in-time” access to development resources. Consequently, educational leaders are increasingly participating in social media spaces to help them (and their colleagues) in their efforts to engage in high-quality practice. Moreover, accessing these social media networks may provide access to a professional community and record of the flow of resources (practices, tools, approaches, etc.) that can be traced, examined, and quantified. Through this communication, distribution, and sharing of resources, a digitally driven online community of practice may develop that provides opportunity for collaboration, reflection, development, and, importantly, just-in-time professional learning. 

The social continuum of online and offline interactions reflects a complex labyrinth of networks and connections that link people who share information, (innovative) ideas, resources, perceptions, beliefs, myths, rumors, and so on, in a real-time, immense, networked communication system. The result is that everything is connected in some way, from people, to information, to data, to events, and even to places, all with multiple interdependent relationships that form a vast aggregate social network (Wellman, 2004). The constellation of ties that surround actors can occur in both offline and online contexts and, we argue, is actually part of the same social continuum. 

The complex relationship structures that emerge online—such as leadership practices, support, and expertise—are currently uncharted. Through social media, the interpretation and mediation of meaning occurs at the level of interaction, and these interactions represent explicit ties that bind people together. Through an innovative set of methods similar to what we applied to the Teacher2Teacher network, we have been capturing and analyzing these interactions as a social network at a depth and scale that makes the invisible visible (Supovitz, Daly, & Del Fresno, 2018). The relational data captured from social media offer many new opportunities to understand communication and knowledge practices in the social media space and provides unique insights into the virtual networks of educational leaders.

To bring all these ideas to life and illustrate our argument, we offer some longitudinal work from Twitter data from a year of collection (June 2017 to December 2018) in which we tracked several key educational leadership hashtags (e.g., #leadupchat, #edadmin, #principalsinaction) to visualize the network and identify influencers. Over this period, the network remained consistently active, resulting in a collection of 800,000 tweets reflecting more than 110,00 unique actors who interacted around 13,000 unique hashtags. It should be noted that the individuals in this space are not necessarily in formal leadership roles; part of our analysis will be to unpack formal positions. However, the assumption in our work is that these hashtags reflect virtual spaces where those interested in educational leaders, presumably educational leaders themselves, will interact.  

Our analysis reveals the overall network structure of the educational leadership virtual space, highlighting several key structural dimensions and a host of highly influential actors (see Figure 1). In Figure 1, each node represents a unique actor, and the lines reflect the tweets, retweets, and/or mentions between each actor. The different groups that are reflected by varied colors indicate subcommunities that interacted more with other leaders in that group than outside it, resulting in four unique groups: red, blue, green, and purple subcommunities. 

In addition, we identified the major hashtags with which educational leaders were interacting that went beyond the initial collection of hashtags (e.g., #leadupchat, #edadmin, #principalsinaction; see Figure 1). In the visualization of hashtags in Figure 1, two main hashtag communities were formed around “leadupchat” and “JoyfulLeaders,” which are the predominant hashtags that educational leaders seemed to be using over the time period. 

Figure 1. Overall actor and hashtag network, June 2017–December 2018

Leaders	Hashtags

We also identified the top 1% of actors and hashtags in the educational leadership space (see Figure 2). Key influencers were in this space, @Jeffhiseredu (college director), @SteeleThoughts (principal), and @Bethhill2829 (principal and founder of “joyfulleader”), for example (Figure 2). Those individuals and the material they tweeted were quite often retweeted, so they may have had disproportionate influence over the field. When we examined the material that was being highly retweeted, it was primarily inspirational messages and quick-to-implement practices, but this assertion is speculative because we have not conducted our final systematic analysis to date. This early work indicates some important areas for future work and, like the teacher network described earlier, indicates the presence of social structure, individual influencers, and subcommunities. 

The visualization of the 1% hashtag network in Figure 2 is to get an idea of where leaders are typically gathering in virtual space. These data indicate that there are two main communities where leaders virtually congregate—these communities are anchored by #leadupchat and #joyfulleader. Interestingly, there is only minimal overlap in these communities, suggesting two core communities that are highly active within their community parameter. In addition, a more general education hashtag, #educhat, also was present, suggesting overlap between more traditional teacher virtual spaces and leader spaces. Our future work will more clearly discern the population of actors that occupy these spaces. 

Figure 2. “Elite” (top 1%) of actor and hashtag network, June 2017–December 2018

LeaderHashtag

This network perspective on leadership in virtual space and preliminary work represents some of the earliest efforts in analyzing the virtual networks of educational leaders and provides some tantalizing evidence about leader networks. Although we have some interesting insights from the teacher space, we have limited knowledge about the virtual communities of educational leaders, the influencers in the space, and the type of content they may be sharing; these early results suggest that this is fertile ground for exploration. This chapter is not to make evidence-based conclusions; rather, we set about to argue for the analytic potential of a network perspective in education in general, and for educational leadership in particular. We are offering a proof of concept that suggests we can learn more about educational leadership from this type of endeavor and, it is hoped, catalyze additional thinking and effort in the space. 

CONCLUDING THOUGHTS

As we think across what we present in this chapter, we are also attempting to reconceptualize “space” and social activity that goes well beyond physical geographies to embrace the idea of activity and social geographies in order to encompass an even wider perspective about what is happening in educational leadership spaces. At its core, the work presented in this chapter is based on the proposition that activity in social space produces complex systems that are situated in networks of interactions and interdependence. Moreover, the work underscores the importance of networks and relationships to better understand the growth and spread of innovation, ideas, and resources. It also supports the social network perspective that we live in a social world and are impacted by others in ways that are both conscious and unconscious. Our ability to actively interact with others, network, and engage in new social systems is critical for our work and understanding of ourselves as we move deeper into a knowledge economy in which collaboration, social skills, and leveraging interdependent social networks are increasingly important and necessary, and hold potential economic, social, political, and cultural value. 

Better understanding of newly evolving concepts and findings from network science that are enacted in a social continuum are important for adding to our knowledge and building our individual and collective ability to learn, lead, and leverage networks for change and growth. Our research suggests that the work of the 21st century is not only about facts, figures, and rote learning; it is also about the generation of intellectual capital and the creation, development, and management of knowledge and opinion as they exist in multiple, complex, and dynamic systems. Approaching the work of educational leadership as a system of relations recognizes that while the individual is important, it is the system of interactions among individuals that is equally informative. A social network perspective reveals the consequential interactions that are hidden in plain sight and has the potential to provide us with unique insights. 

Notes

1. See www.hashtagcommoncore.com for insight into methods and approaches used on a different data set.

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Response to the Signals

Contributors: Martha Bruckner, Bill Mathis, Terry Grier, Martin Brooks, Charles Fowler, Art Stellar, Frank Hewins and John Erickson

First, how to delay or avoid the Signals.”

To avoid the signals, one superintendent does the following:

 1. Each week, I would reflect on what my staff and I did last week to help meet the one or two BIG goals the organization had set for the year.

 2. Each week, I would make sure that I took time each day to meditate or engage in a physical workout session.

 3. Each week, I would ask key questions of my associates and assistants about their work-progress and roadblocks.

 4. Each week, I would visit schools and ask teachers whether the administrative staff was visiting their classroom and providing them with needed support.

 5. Each week, I would review attendance data (especially for the primary grades), and dropout data from middle and high schools.

 6. Each week, I would commit not to be at evening events more than two nights. I’d delegate attendance at others to staff (putting the job ahead of family and faith will cause you to lose both).

 7. Each week, I would meet with the board president and hold a separate meeting with another member of the board. It would be a breakfast meeting to save time. I would always end the meeting with the question, “How do you think I’m doing?”

Another superintendent response to the Signals:

My experience suggests that a facilitated annual retreat/goal setting meeting is an effective way to deal with many of these issues. It really should be facilitated by a neutral party to effectively address the most sensitive issues.

Another approach would be through the superintendent evaluation process, trying to avoid or at least minimize the use of a “checklist” in favor of open-ended questions which can become the focus of discussion (e.g. “One change which the superintendent could make in his/her leadership style/approach this year that I would favor would be. . .” The Superintendent should also be given the opportunity to post a similar question about the Board (e.g. “One change which the Board members could make in their work with me which I feel could make me more effective, would be. . .”). 

Another superintendent’s response:

“I have entered every one of my jobs the same way I existed them, fired with enthusiasm.”

This statement was not true, but his point was well taken that as a school leader it is healthy for your career and well-being and that of your school district for you to strive to be a positive person. What you say and what you do is very important. How you say it, and how you do it is of equal or even greater importance.

Advice about career planning:

Realistically the ”Signals” are the challenges that all superintendents will experience to some degree. It is simply a part of the job. Given this reality, it is clear that if one is thin-skinned, the superintendency is not a wise career choice.

Some leadership advice:

Look for ongoing professional development experiences that will aid you in building the skills needed to navigate the turbulent waters of the superintendency. The position of a school superintendent is two-fold. One is to administer the functions of the school system. The nuts and bolts of executing the task by doing the right things promptly. This is, of course, a must. But two, it is to be a leader. A leader who passes on retributive actions in favor of actions that protect the good things happening in the school system, restore positive happenings that have been lost and initiate happenings that will establish a positive learning environment; a positive environment for the students, the faculty and staff as well as the community it serves.

After the Signals. . . . 

A veteran superintendent suggested:

The easiest thing to do is counting to three. Then, call your lawyer and negotiated a graceful departure. The board and you should agree to say nice things about each other and want the district to move forward on a positive front.

An old axion:

“ If you are being run out of town … get to the front and make it look like a parade.” 

Finding a way back:

Another suggestion would be to leave the region and get a new start and work your way back.

Family:

My first response in this situation would be to talk frankly with your spouse or partner. No matter how a superintendent’s departure occurs, there’s the potential for complete upheaval in family relationships, and those loved ones must be informed about the coming changes. 

Pack your suitcase and be ready to run! It is always a good idea to have your resume updated, some letters of reference handy and a list of persons ready to speak well of you – the latter two items can be done regularly, so as not to suggest you are leaving.

Some advice about your style:

First, however, reassess your behavior and determine if you are the problem, rather than the board. If it is you, make adjustments. Determine what you can do to turn things around. Count your supporters and calculate their influence and how long they will be on the board. Identify the degree to which you want to stay vs leave. 

Try to slow everything down.
This will enable you to make fewer decisions which will lessen the criticism and pressure. By slowing things down, you will present the board or others with fewer reasons to react negatively to you. You want to buy time.

And some sage advice from a retired superintendent:

1. Buy a packet of gold stars and stringently pass them out for exceptional work — as if they were the Medal of Honor. Meanwhile, lavish ecumenical praise on leaders and staff for less exceptional work. Do not leave any group feeling left out.

 2. Attend funerals even if you didn’t know the honoree. Go to road races, football games, painful music concerts, etc.

 3. Practice Zen and the Art of School Administration. Think macro, carefully and wisely.

 4. Hire good people and give them latitude. This multiplies your effectiveness.

 5. Be the learner. Be the lighthouse. Write for both the NY Times and the weekly shopper, study, read, speak and convey the most important and significant research and knowledge about education.

 5. Be the leader. Be active and visible in a professional venue (association, politics, etc.).

 6. Avoid in-service programs about “leadership.”

 7. If the state aid formula harms the poor, don’t whine about it — Sue the bastards!

Finally, a bit of humor. Some would call “gallows” humor.

“Write three Letters” to the new superintendent. 

The new superintendent was hired to replace an outgoing superintendent. The outgoing superintendent met with the incoming superintendent for an exit interview. During the discussion, the departing superintendent stated he had placed three very important letters in his drawer just as his predecessor had done for him. He explained that the new superintendent would find opening the letters in order most useful when a serious event took place. He also stated the letters left for him had helped him over his tenure.

Several months passed before a major event came up. The new superintendent now remembered the letters and noticed they were numbered 1, 2, and 3. The former superintendent had instructed they be opened for maximal benefit. The new superintendent opened letter #1 and the paper inside had the words “blame it on your predecessor.” The new superintendent did as the letter stated and amazingly he was able to avert serious problems and keep his job.

Several months passed before the next serious event took place. This one was growing in magnitude and things were starting to get ugly. There were even calls for the superintendent to step down. In desperation, the superintendent opened the drawer and pulled out letter #2. With great fear he, opened it carefully to read the word “blame it on the school board.” He followed the instructions and just as before he was saved. The school district quieted down and went back to business as usual.

After about a year, a third serious event took place and it was much worse than the rest. The superintendent knew how to get out of the mess because he had a third letter left to open. With a smile, he reached for the letter #3 and opened it to read “write 3 letters.”

The point being that as a superintendent in a school district, you know that sooner or later you will get tapped on the shoulder to leave. It may be that you screwed up big time, but this is not always the case. The district may be transitioning from one stage of growth to another and the Board of Directors feels a different skill set would be better in the company. Many superintendents see trends for replacement over a four or five-year period. Some stay much longer, some shorter, but no one stays forever. It is hard to not take these events personally, but you can’t; it’s a profession.  

 So what is the point of this article? You are that good! It is just that there is so much diversity of thought and talent; others may feel better by having someone else with a different skill set. Sometimes it is not your call to leave, but do not take it personally.

Well, you are that good, but let’s come back to that.  First a story:
A new superintendent was hired to replace an outgoing superintendent.  The outgoing superintendent met with the incoming superintendent for an exit interview.  During the discussion, the departing superintendent stated he had placed three very important letters in his drawer just as his predecessor had done for him.  He explained that the new superintendent would find opening the letters in order most useful when a serious event took place.  He also stated the letters left for him had helped him over his tenure. 

Several months passed before a major event came up.  The new superintendent now remembered the letters and noticed they were numbered 1, 2, and 3. The former superintendent had instructed they be opened for maximal benefit.  The new superintendent opened letter #1 and the paper inside had the words “blame it on your predecessor.”  The new superintendent did as the letter stated and amazingly he was able to avert serious problems and keep his job. 

Several months passed before the next serious event took place.  This one was growing in magnitude and things were starting to get ugly at the company.  There were even calls for the superintendent to step down.  In desperation, the superintendent opened the drawer and pulled out letter #2.  With great fear he, opened it carefully to read the word “reorganize.”  He followed the instructions and just as before he was saved. The whole company quieted down and went back to business as usual.

 After about a year, a third serious event took place and it was much worse than the rest.  The superintendent knew how to get out of the mess because he had a third letter left to open.  With a smile, he reached for the letter #3 and opened it to read “write 3 letters.” 

As a superintendent in a school district, you know that sooner or later you will get tapped on the shoulder to leave.  It may be that you screwed up big time, but this is not always the case.  The school district may be transitioning from one stage of growth to another and the Board of Directors feels a different skill set would be better in the company.  The trends for a replacement is usually three to five years.  Some stay much longer, some shorter, but no one stays forever.  It is hard to not take these events personally, but you can’t; it’s the profession.  

A retired superintendent once told me a story of his retirement ceremony hosted by his friends.  At his retirement ceremony, he was given a letter describing how much he would be missed.  The letter described how much the community would miss him.   The whole thing can be summarized by the following:  “if you put your arm into a tub of water and pull it out the hole left in the water shows how much you will be missed.”  Essentially with any vacuum, the hole gets filled by the surroundings.

So what is the point of this story?  You are that good!  It is just that there is so much diversity of thought and talent; others may feel better by having someone else with a different skill set.  Sometimes it is not your call to leave, so do not take it personally.

Contributors: Drs. Martha Bruckner, Larry Dlugosh, John Erickson, Charles Fowler, Terry Grier, Frank Hewins, Larry Nyland, Douglas Otto, and Art Stellar. Edited by Jack McKay

Often, during the career of the superintendent, there are times when gestures and messages are sent, sometimes quietly and at other times very loud and clear. Having the intuition and skill to handle those signals is essential to one’s sanity and career.

Recently, I asked a few colleagues, all experienced and successful in their professional careers, about the things they would suggest the superintendent watch in order to make a timely decision about board-suprintendent relations or moving on to a different district. What are those signals?

Following is a “checklist” of the signals that may be telling you, it’s time to update the resume. Of course, all of these signals may not apply to you, but one may be just enough.”

Signals from the board or board chair

1.    Board meetings are excessively long, unproductive, and/or politically charged.

2.    Board members ask questions that border on questioning your trust and wisdom.

3.    The board chair allows longer periods of public comment about your work and then not defending you.

4.    The board chair reminds you that you are gone out of the district to too many meetings.

5.    The board members that hired you make up less than half of the current board.

6.    Board members are split between the desire for you to have you improve your technical skills or human relations skills.

7.    Board members having a secret or executive session without you present.

8.    Board members hanging around after board meetings in the parking lot.

9.    Board members have an increase in split votes, especially if split by the same members

10. Board members ask more critical questions about your recommendations.

11. Board members don’t take actions on your recommendations.

12. Board members disagree with you publicly at meetings and on social media.

13. Board members disagree or hedge on considering your salary, benefits or contract.

14. Board members talking to other school administrators without including you.

15. Board members change the indicators of success for the district or you.

16. Board members delay or stop evaluating your performance.

17. Board members question your vacation days or travel expenses.

18. Board members violate their protocols about speaking with staff and administrators.

19. Board members change from civil to disrespect amongst themselves.

20. One board member begins to wield disproportionate sway over the others.

21. Board members start micro-managing administrative matters.

22. Board members entertaining complaints about your performance from staff and then not telling you.

23. Board members have special interest or issues that seem to be unresolved.

24. Board members recruiting board candidates who are openly opposed to your leadership.

25. Board members wanting to be involved in approving administrative appointments.

26. Board members failing to police their members for disrespectful behavior.

27. Board members rejecting your decisions, even when evidence is clear and compelling to approve them.

28. Board members calling on other staff regarding issues, rather than going through you first.

29. Board members question policy issues at the board meeting without prior notice to you.

30. Board members listening to complaints and not referring them to you

31. Board members are inconsistent about the informal and formal comments or complaints about your performance.

32. Board members rely on email, rather than phone calls or face to face meetings with you.

33. Board members elect a chair that is critical of your performance.

34. Board member(s) asks to speak with the district’s attorney-legal counsel without you present.

Signals from the Community:

1.    Lots of candidates running for the school board vacancies

2.    Current board members being asked to not run for re-election.

3.    Narrow victories for board members or the incumbents are not re-elected.

Signals to yourself:

1.    On Mondays, do you dread going to work or the board meeting?

2.    Your family wonders if you ever come home to dinner anymore.

3.    You are tempted to intentionally keep bad news from the board until after a school tax election.

4.    You have accomplished what you set out to do in the first three or four years.

5.    Your intuition tells you it is time to move on.

6.    You realize you are not in sync with the local politics or culture of the community

There is an old axiom about the life of the superintendent. 
The current superintendent is leading the local community parade. A bystander remarked. “I can’t tell if he is actually leading the parade or being chased out of town.”

Some words of wisdom, if you decide to move:

1.    If possible, leave on a positive note about the school district, the community, and your own professional future.

2.    Help your successor be successful by opening doors and helping or him or her be welcomed to the school district and community.

3.    Be careful about reflecting back on your experience with the school board and community. Whatever said will certainly get back to everyone.

4.    Build on your experiences and talents and carry them forward while taking on the challenges of you next superintendency.

Some additional thoughts by the contributors:

His board members hung out in the parking lot after the meeting wanting to know where they were all going – including the superintendent – to socialize after the meeting.  They liked each other and even called me at a national meeting to sing Happy Birthday to him.  Terry says, “That was a really good board!”   Terry Grier

Of course, sometimes there is no warning, even the unanimous approval of a new long-term contract offers no protection from an unexpected buyout. A buyout is better than nothing and perhaps the board will provide a grace period to find another position without the public clamor. Some board members want the public recognition for forcing the superintendent out, even if it costs a fortune. –Art Stellar

This is a vexing problem, especially for ‘place-bound” superintendents. There are lots of challenges and considerations when a superintendent wants to move. John Erickson

One colleague asked me how to respond to a new board chair that presented a long list – more than a dozen items – that he wanted to see addressed.  When you are working more and enjoying it less … it may be time to update the resume.   Larry Nyland

I think when a super takes a job, he/she needs to determine what his/ her mission or goal is in that district. The goal may revolve around the district’s strategic plan or other self-set goals to accomplish. It may take a year in the district to figure out why you were placed in that district. It may take just a few years to accomplish the mission or goals or it may be longer. When you think it is accomplished that may be the signal. Or else you re-set the mission or goals and start over. – John Sweet

I was thinking about a call I received from a long-time friend. I was having a bad week with a couple of problem board members and he must have sensed it. He asked, “Do you feel like you need a friend?” I replied that I certainly did. He said, “get a dog” and hung up! It was exactly what I needed to hear!  – Larry Dlugosh

About the contributors:

Dr. Martha Bruckner, most recently, Superintendent of the Council Bluffs Community Schools, Iowa.

Dr. Larry Dlugosh, most recently, Department Chair of Educational Administration at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln, Nebraska.

Dr. John Erickson, most recently, Superintendent of the Vancouver School District in Vancouver, Washington.

Dr. Charles Fowler, most recently, President of School Leadership Inc. a superintendent search firm in Exeter, New Hampshire.

Dr. Terry Grier, most recently, Superintendent of the Houston Independent School District in Houston, Texas.

Dr. Frank Hewins, most recently, Superintendent of the Franklin Pierce School District near Tacoma, Washington

Dr. Larry Nyland, most recently, Superintendent of the Seattle Public School in Seattle, Washington.

Dr. Douglas Otto, most recently, Superintendent of the Plano Independent School District in Plano, Texas.

Dr. Art Stellar, Vice President of the National Education Foundation of Alexandria, Virginia.

Dr. John Sweet, most recently, Superintendent of Delano County Schools in Delano, Minnesota.

Edited by Jack McKay, Professor Emeritus, Department of Educational Administration at the University of Nebraska at Omaha. Prior to higher education, 15 years as a superintendent.

By Stephen Sawchuk on the ED Week site.

In the annals of documents that need to be crafted carefully, you can list the superintendent’s back-to-school letter to parents alongside things like résumés, break-up texts, and condo association bylaws.

The dreaded back-to-school letter has to strike a fine balance between being pleasingly warm and being hokey; between giving parents information they need to know, and overwhelming them. So Education Week hunted down a few superintendents to share their insights into what they think should make the cut—and what the letters absolutely shouldn’t include. 

Their big takeaway: The back-to-school letter typically arrives in a packet with a bunch of other stuff, like bus routes, bell schedules, and permission slips. It is not going to go up on the fridge next to the kids’ collages from summer camp. So don’t put a million things in it.

But the letter should briefly sketch out any major changes parents will be encountering somewhere along the lines in the school year. And it absolutely should convey the district’s values, they agreed.

Keep it short, focused, and practical. 

 “A single sheet of paper, between one to two sides,” said Jeanné Wright, who’s entering her sixth year heading up the Rutland NE school district in Vermont, a consolidated district serving a number of towns. “It’s really all you want: a brief reminder of what we do, and this is why we do it, and this is where we’re headed, and we invite you to be part of the journey.” 

It’s a fine place to introduce parents to the new faces in the district, new resources, or any change that’s materially going to affect how parents get kids to and from school. It could, for instance, mention the new director of transportation, highlight the district’s new website, or point to an initiative that will alter school schedules.

“For example, in the past I introduced the idea of early-release Wednesdays for teacher learning time. That would be an example of a change in practice or schedule that we would have included,” she said. “Or a particular curriculum that we’re introducing—all of that can be spoken to in the introductory letter.” 

“I cut out 75 percent of what I would normally want to put into a letter; we want them to read the whole thing,” said Larry Spring, the superintendent in Schenectady, N.Y., who has led the district for eight years. “What you’re sending them is delivery of information, but that’s fairly fleeting: The letter is gonna go in the garbage. So what you really want to make sure comes through in the letter is this notion that schools were built for your kids. And we want it to feel that way when your kid comes through the doors: We’re here for you.”

Keep it upbeat … 

This can be a challenge if your district has gone through staff cuts or a bond failure or some other major problem. But rehashing what didn’t go well the prior year is generally a no-no, the superintendents all said. 

“Keep it light, but positive and enthusiastic,” said Joseph Maruszczak, the superintendent of the Mendon-Upton Regional School District in Massachusetts, now in his ninth year. “You have to stay focused on what your mission is as a district and what is the thing that drives your work.” He said it helps to open with a little bit about his own family—as he did last year, when he talked about the difficulty of seeing one of his daughters off to college: “The human element of that correspondence is really, really important as well.”

Absolutely don’t use the letter to justify or bring up something from the prior year that upset parents, especially if it’s something you botched. The letter should be resolutely forward-looking. It can be especially tempting to rehash personnel changes, especially if they were sudden or unexpected, noted Spring.

“I’ve had a convo with a supe who wanted to put in this letter that these new admins were joining, but felt like it was out of place because he hadn’t had a conversation about why the former ones left. And I was explaining that he’d already dropped the ball on communications,” Spring said. “You don’t want to try to do that retrospective processing in the letter.” 

Summed up Wright on Vermont: “A ‘Don’t do this, don’t do that, the sky is falling’ message is not going to be taken well in this letter.” 

… But stick to your guns on the big stuff.

The 10,000-student Schenectady, N.Y., district serves many disadvantaged students and students of color. It’s doing a lot of work on trauma-informed schools and equity, and on reducing disproportionality of suspensions and explusions for students of color and students with disabilities. Though such discussions make some parents uncomfortable, Superintendent Spring uses his letter to reinforce the district’s work on equity.

“You want to give parents that comfortable, warm feeling that these schools are really accepting and welcoming places for [their children],” he said. “But inside that is this message: We are intentionally working on issues of equity, and we work hard on ensuring race, economics, and disability are no longer predictors of student achievement. This is not necessarily a message that everyone likes, because part of it [acknowledges] that schools have traditionally not always been welcoming places, and some students in particular have found them to be unwelcoming.” 

Don’t reiterate every detail of the strategic plan … 

Superintendents take the long view. They know the ins and outs of the the master facilities plan. They know how far they’ve gotten in the strategic plan, and where they need to press harder. But this is not the place to lay out a whole bunch of bullet-pointed initiatives.

“People on Aug 15 don’t want to be mired in the details,” said Maruszczak. “I see the letter kind of being able to highlight what the big ideas are, what the priorities are, but not doing it in an overwhelming manner, or doing it in a way that a staff member reading that is going to feel overwhelmed. Keeping it light is important, and keeping it super, super positive about the possibilities.”  

… But it’s OK to highlight core themes.

Maruszczak’s district has been putting a lot of work into social-emotional learning and developing six attributes that comprise the “portrait of a learner”; he’ll play those themes up in his back-to-school letter.

In Rutland NE, one of several districts in that state that has recently consolidated, Wright said she continues to look for opportunities to reinforce the theme of co-operation and union among the schools that used to belong to different school systems. “We are finding we do need to find new ways to reiterate that we are unified and not seven different schools or eight different communities,” she said.

It’s also a good time to signal staff appreciation.

Most of the superintendents said they host a welcome-back meeting just for staff early in the school year. Still, the back-to-school letter can also be a good place to send the message to staff that they’re valued.

Wright said she likes to stress that while school’s been out, teachers haven’t been sitting idly by. 

“I think it’s important to stress the ongoing learning that teachers do over the summer to change that paradigm that teachers only work nine months out of the year, which is a common perception from non-educators. It’s a different work schedule that teachers have, it’s a different intensity, and once the teacher steps in the classroom at 8 in the morning they’re really on stage until 3 or so,” she said. “Summer is their opportunity to refresh their learning and create new ideas and update their curriculum. That’s not well understood outside of the education sphere.” 

To sum up…

An obscure Victorian novelist once famously described his philosophy for engaging the reading public: “Make ’em laugh, make ’em cry, make ’em wait.”

Basically, superintendents, when they’re dealing with parents, should ignore that advice completely.

Got any additional thoughts, tips, or sample letters? Go ahead and join the conversation below! Also, see District Dossier’s advice for new principals series. 

Importance of Public Speaking by Bishara Adam 

A slide presentation on the importance of public speaking.

 Demonstrate knowledge
 Increases knowledge
 Impress others
 Develop and shows confidence
 Differentiate you in your workplace
 Opportunity to promote yourself
 Make your business  (Click to view slides.)

Making a Motion

Presenting Business to the Assembly

The most common way to present business to the members at a meeting is to make a main motion. An idea is not discussed first and then a motion made; instead, a motion is made and then the idea is discussed. This chapter explains the basic steps in presenting a motion: how to make a main motion, how to discuss it, and how to take a vote on the motion. It also explains when a motion is out of order. For example, motions are out of order when they conflict with the rules of the organization or the laws of the land, or when they propose action outside the scope of the organization’s objectives.

BASIC STEPS IN PRESENTING A MOTION

Before you present a motion, make sure that it contains all the pertinent information, including who, what, where, and when. Word the motion in the positive, not in the negative. Here is an example of a main motion:

Member: Madam President, I move that we have a picnic on Saturday, June 15, at 3 p.m. in the park.

This motion includes all the necessary information and states it in a positive manner. It is ready to present.

1. A member stands and addresses the chair, saying:Member: Mr. President [or Madam President]orMember: Mr. Chairman [or Madam Chairman]
2. The chair assigns the member the floor by stating the member’s name or nodding at the member.The member states the motion:Member: I move that . . .orMember: I move to . . .

Member: I move to . . .

Member: I move to have a picnic on Saturday, June 15, at 3 p.m. in the park.

1. Another member seconds the motion by calling out:Member: I second the motion.or simplyMember: Second.
2. The chair restates the motion and places it before the assembly by saying:President: It is moved and seconded that . . . . Is there any discussion?President: It is moved and seconded to have a picnic on Saturday, June 15, at 3 p.m. in the park. Is there any discussion?
3. The members now have the right to debate or discuss the motion.
4. When the discussion is finished, the chair puts the motion to a vote by saying:President: All those in favor say “Aye.” Those opposed say “No.”
5. The chair announces the vote and who will carry out the action if it is adopted.President: The ayes have it, and the motion is carried. We will have a picnic on Saturday, June 15, at 3 p.m. in the park. The Social Committee will take care of the details.orPresident: The noes have it, and the motion is lost. We will not have a picnic on Saturday, June 15, at 3 p.m. in the park. Is there further business?

Now let’s look at the steps for making a motion in detail.

MAKING A MAIN MOTION

To make a main motion, a member must obtain the floor. To do so, stand and address the president, saying:

Member: Mr. President [or Madam President]

or

Member: Madam Chairman [or Mr. Chairman]

This is the correct parliamentary terminology. Many people want to say chairwoman or chairperson, but these terms are incorrect. The English language does not have feminine or masculine words, as do the Latin-based languages. The word chair in English is the neuter gender, neither masculine nor feminine. It refers either to the person or the place (chair) occupied by the person. The word man at the end does not mean a masculine person but stands for the neuter gender all mankind, including both men and women. So in English, to acknowledge the gender of the person presiding in the chair, use the honorifics Mr. or Madam, as follows: Mr. Chairman or Madam Chairman.

After the chair is addressed, the presiding officer recognizes the member by saying his or her name or nodding at the member. This means that the member is assigned the floor and can speak.

The correct way to state a motion is:

Member: I move that . . .

It helps to memorize and practice this phrase. Here’s an example:

Member: Madam President, I move that we have a picnic on Saturday, June 15, at 3 p.m. in the park.

State motions in the positive, not the negative. Write the motion on a piece of paper and give it to the president after you state it. This helps the chairman (or chair) repeat the motion to the assembly exactly the way it was moved. The way in which the presiding officer states the motion to the assembly is the official wording of the motion, and it’s recorded in the minutes. Many times, presiding officers do not repeat the motion exactly as the member has stated it. If you put the motion in writing and give it to the presiding officer, the officer can repeat it exactly as you presented it, and the secretary can record it correctly in the minutes.

After you make the motion, sit down. Another member must second the motion. A second simply means that another member thinks the motion should be discussed. It does not mean that the member is necessarily in favor of it.

The person who seconds the motion does not need to rise and address the president but can call out the second from where he or she sits. The member can say:

Member: Second.

or

Member: I second the motion.

If no one seconds it, the president can ask:

President: Is there a second?

Member: I second it.

If the motion does not get a second, members can’t discuss it and the president goes on to the next business in order. The president can say:

President: Without a second, the motion will not be considered.

Avoid using the phrase “dies for lack of a second.”

If the motion is seconded, the president restates the motion to the members. This is called placing the motion before the assembly. The president must do this so that members can discuss the motion. The president says:

President: It is moved and seconded that we have a picnic on Saturday, June 15, at 3 p.m. in the park. Is there any discussion?

The president needs to memorize the following phrase in restating the motion:

President: It is moved and seconded that . . . . Is there any discussion?

DISCUSSING A MOTION

Members always have the right to debate or discuss a main motion. After the president asks for discussion, members can give reasons why they think having a picnic is a good idea or a bad idea.

The person who makes the motion has the first right to speak to the motion. To do that, the member rises, addresses the president, obtains the floor, and then speaks to the motion. After the member is done, he or she sits down so that someone else can speak to the motion – either for or against it. In discussing the motion, everyone gets to have a turn to talk, but everyone must wait his or her turn. A member can speak to a motion only when no one else is assigned the floor. If two people stand to speak at the same time, the president designates who should speak. The member not recognized sits down. When the other member finishes speaking, the member who did not speak can then stand to speak.

In debate, members address all remarks through the chair. Cross talk between members is not allowed, and mentioning other members’ names is avoided as much as possible. All remarks are made in a courteous tone.

In most meetings, each member may speak two times on a debatable motion, but the member does not get the second turn as long as another member wants to speak for the first time. A member is not permitted to speak against his or her own motion. However, if the member changes his or her mind after hearing the motion discussed, the member may vote against it. (For more specific rules of debate, see Chapter 4.)

When speaking to a motion that you haven’t made, a common courtesy before you begin your remarks is to say:

Member: I speak for the motion.

or

Member: I speak against the motion.

This way, the assembly knows which side of the issue you are supporting. It also helps the president keep a balance in the debate. If there are more people speaking against the motion, the president may ask if anyone wants to speak for the motion.

In debate, everyone has the right to speak, and the president must be just and impartial in assigning the floor, allowing all sides of the issue to be heard.

Discussion continues until the president realizes that the membership is ready to vote.

TAKING THE VOTE

When no one rises to speak to the motion, the president calls for the vote. Most voting takes place via a voice vote. A majority vote adopts main motions, which means that more than half of the members voting favor the motion.

President: Is there any further discussion? [Pause and look around the room to see if anyone wants to speak.] Hearing none, the question is on the adoption of the motion to have a picnic on Saturday, June 15, at 3 p.m. in the park. All those in favor say “Aye.” Those opposed say “No.”

The president always announces the result of the vote. If the affirmative wins, he or she announces the vote this way:

President: The ayes have it, and the motion is carried. We will have a picnic on Saturday, June 15, at 3 p.m. in the park.

If the negative wins, the president announces the vote this way:

President: The noes have it, and the motion is lost. We won’t be having a picnic on Saturday, June 15, at 3 p.m. in the park.

The president asks only for the yes and no votes and does not ask for those who want to abstain. The president always takes the no vote, even if the yes vote sounds unanimous.

The members must feel that any vote taken is a fair vote. If any member doubts the results of a voice vote, the member can call out:

Member: Division.

or

Member: I call for a division.

or

Member: I doubt the result of the vote.

In this one instance, a member does not have to rise to obtain the floor but can call out “Division” from wherever he or she is sitting. It does not need a second.

The president immediately retakes the vote as a rising vote by asking the members to stand. The chair makes a visual judgment and does not count the vote. The president says:

President: All those in favor please rise. Be seated. Those opposed please rise. Be seated. The affirmative has it, and the motion is carried.

Or, if the majority of members were opposed, the president states:

President: The negative has it, and the motion is lost.

If the president is in doubt as to which side wins, he or she can retake the vote and have it counted. If a member wants the vote counted, the member makes a motion to have a counted vote. The motion requires a second, is not debatable, and must pass by a majority vote.

In addition to a voice vote, the organization can take a vote by general consent, a show of hands, a rising vote, or ballot. The chair can choose to take the vote by voice, show of hands, or rising. To take a ballot vote, a member must make a motion to do so. A ballot vote ensures the secrecy of each member’s vote. If you do not want others to know how you voted, or if you want an accurate count of the vote, a ballot vote is the way to accomplish your goal. (For a more thorough explanation of these voting procedures, see Chapter 5.)

To ask for a ballot vote, a member must rise, address the chair, and move to take the vote by ballot. This motion needs a second, is not debatable, and must pass by a majority vote.

Member: Mr. President, I move that this vote be taken by ballot.

Member 2: Second.

President: It is moved and seconded to take this vote by ballot. All those in favor say “Aye.” Those opposed say “No.” The ayes have it, and we will take the vote by ballot.

If the members vote against the motion, the chair says:

President: The noes have it, and the vote will not be taken by ballot.

COMPLETING THE ACTION ON THE MOTION

The action on the motion is completed when the president announces the result of the vote as well as how the action will be carried out. Members can expect that the approved action is carried out as authorized unless they decide to reconsider the vote, rescind the action, or amend the adopted motion (see Chapter 10).

IMPORTANT POINTS TO REMEMBER BEFORE MAKING A MOTION

Not every main motion is in order, and both the members and the presiding officer need to know when a presented motion violates the following rules. If a main motion violates the following rules, it is the presiding officer’s duty to rule the motion out of order. If the chair does not do this, a member should call this to the assembly’s attention by raising a point of order.

1. No motion is in order that conflicts with federal, state, or local law; with the rules of a parent organization; or with the organization’s constitution or bylaws or other rules of the organization. Even if a unanimous vote adopts the motion, it is null and void if it conflicts with the previously mentioned rules.For example, if someone makes a motion to expand the clubhouse and city or state zoning laws prohibit doing so, the motion is out of order; or, if the school district has rules against having a student dance on a week night, a motion by a student group to have a dance on Tuesday evening is out of order.
2. A motion that proposes action outside the scope of the organization’s object (which should be written in the corporate charter or bylaws) is not in order unless the members vote to allow it to be considered. Doing so takes a two-thirds vote.For example, suppose an organization’s object is to take care of stray animals and build a shelter for them. A member also wants to create a soup kitchen for homeless people. Unfortunately, doing so is outside the scope of the organization’s object.If the member makes a motion that is outside of the organization’s object, the presiding officer states:President: The motion to have a soup kitchen for homeless people is outside the object of the organization. According to our parliamentary authority, a two-thirds vote is required for this motion to be considered. Members can now discuss whether they want to consider the motion. Is there any discussion about whether we should consider the motion?Discussion can focus only on whether the members should consider the motion. Any discussion about whether to have a soup kitchen is out of order. After discussion, the president should first explain the effect of a yes or no vote on the consideration of this motion, and then put it to a vote:President: If you think this motion is within the scope of the object of the organization and should be considered, vote yes. If you think this motion is outside the scope of the organization and should not be considered, vote no. You are only voting on considering the question. The vote taken does not adopt the motion. Are there any questions? All those in favor, please rise. [Members rise.]Be seated. [Members sit down.]Those opposed please rise. [Members rise.]Be seated. [Members sit down.]There is a two-thirds vote in the affirmative, and we will consider the question. It is moved and seconded that we have a soup kitchen for homeless people. Is there any discussion?If the noes have it, the chair states:President: There is less than a two-thirds vote in the affirmative. The negative has it, and we will not consider the motion to have a soup kitchen for homeless people.Even though a parliamentary rule states that members, by a two-thirds vote, can consider something outside the object of the organization, remember that the object is part of the bylaws. When members consider something outside the object of the organization, they are, in essence, suspending part of the bylaws. The best approach in handling the situation is to amend the object of the organization. Give members previous notice of the proposed change and time to think about what the real purpose of the organization should be.
3. A main motion is not in order if it conflicts with a motion that was previously adopted by the assembly and that is still in force. However, the assembly can decide to rescind the action or amend something previously adopted.For example, say that the club adopted a motion to give $100 yearly to the local humane society. If a member makes a motion to give $200 yearly to the humane society, the motion conflicts with what was already adopted and is therefore not in order. However, if the member phrases it as the motion to amend something previously adopted, it is in order and requires a two-thirds vote or a majority vote of the entire membership to adopt if no previous notice has been given. If previous notice has been given, it requires a majority vote to adopt. This rule protects the rights of the absent members.
4. A main motion is not in order when it presents substantially the same question as a motion that was rejected during the same session. However, members can bring up the motion at another meeting, and this is known as renewing the motion.For example, suppose that the members vote down a motion to have a car wash to raise money for the dance fund. During discussion, members make it clear that they do not want to have a car wash to raise money for anything. If later in the meeting a member makes a motion to have a car wash to raise money for the leadership training series, it is out of order. The motion can, however, be brought up at another meeting.There is one way this motion can be brought up again at the same meeting, and that is if a member who voted on the prevailing side (in this case the negative side) makes the motion to reconsider the vote on the motion to have a car wash (see Chapter 10).
5. A main motion is not in order if it conflicts with or presents substantially the same question as one that has been temporarily disposed of and is still within control of the assembly. Here are examples:If a motion has been referred to a committee and the committee has not reported, the committee can be discharged and the assembly can take up the motion (see Chapter 10).If a motion has been postponed to later in the meeting or to another meeting, a member can move to suspend the rules and take up the motion at that time. (See Chapter 9, “Suspend the Rules.”)If a motion is laid on the table, members can take it from the table.Members need to be alert to meeting tactics that refer a motion to a committee to bury it (don’t investigate it) or lay it on the table to kill it. Or, while a motion is in the committee or laid on the table, someone presents another version of the motion. Members must realize that even though a motion is in committee or on the table, it is still under the control of the assembly and must be decided first.

RESOLUTIONS

A resolution is a formal way of presenting a motion. It is a main motion, needs a second, and is handled like any other main motion except that it is always presented in writing. The name of the organization is mentioned in the resolution, and the word “resolved” is always italicized. A resolution can be as simple as:

Resolved, That the Glee Club sponsor a “Day of Singing” on April 25 to honor Glee Clubs in our state.

If a resolution is proposed at a mass meeting, word it in the following way:

Resolved, That in the sense of this meeting, we form a Neighborhood Watch program and send letters to all the homes between Martin and Smith streets inviting homeowners to participate.

Sometimes a resolution includes a preamble. A preamble enables members to give background information and to state the reasons why the motion should be adopted. However, a preamble to a resolution is usually not necessary. In fact, a preamble should be used only when the maker of the resolution wants to give little-known information or wants to present important points regarding the adoption of the motion if there is some doubt about whether it will pass. A preamble contains whereasclauses that communicate the important background information to the assembly; the actual resolution then follows. A resolution with a preamble should contain only as many whereas clauses as necessary. For example,

Whereas, A study done by the city commission reveals that there are 100 stray dogs and 250 stray cats in Center City;

Resolved, That the Morningside City Improvement Corporation form a committee of five to be appointed by the board to investigate the cost of establishing a feeding program, as well as establishing a shelter for these animals, and report its findings at the next meeting.

If the resolution has more than one whereas clause, write it this way:

Whereas, A study done by the city commission reveals that there are 100 stray dogs and 250 stray cats in Center City;

Whereas, These hungry animals are wreaking havoc with garbage; and

Whereas, They are having kittens and puppies every two to three months; now, therefore, be it

Resolved, That the Morningside City Improvement Corporation form a committee of five to be appointed by the board to investigate the cost of establishing a feeding program, as well as establishing a shelter for these animals, and report its findings at the next meeting.

By MAUREEN MACKEY, The Fiscal Times
You landed a job interview for a position you really want – but the hiring manager never called you back after it was over. What happened?
It could be that the chemistry wasn’t right, of course, or that the salary didn’t align – but it’s very likely you made some foolish and entirely preventable mistakes that derailed your chances.“Given how competitive it is out there, I’m appalled at some of the interview mistakes people keep making,” says Dana Manciagli, a Seattle career expert who spent a decade at Microsoft and today runs her own executive coaching business. 
She and other experts say that even job candidates at the highest professional levels make mistakes – not just those at lower or mid-level ranks. In a still-tight economy with plenty of people competing for positions of all kinds, here are some of the top job interview clunkers:
1. You leave your cell phone on.
When the ring of your phone cuts short a critical conversation about the job you covet, guess what it does to your chances?One hiring manager in Manhattan says she sees this often – and she’s always amazed when she does. “The job candidates will say, ‘Oh, gee, I’m sorry,’ and reach to turn their phones off. But why didn’t they think of that before they walked in the door? To me, it shows a lack of preparation. It’s also inconsiderate.” And if you actually pick up that phone or send a text during your interview, as some people do – don’t wonder why you weren’t called back. 
2. You’re too focused on yourself.
If you overuse the “I” word during the interview, hiring managers may see a big ego standing in the way of a job offer. “Many candidates talk about themselves ad nauseam, with little or no relevancy to the job opening at hand,” says Manciagli. “Whether this is due to nerves, or a lack of self-awareness, or naiveté – people hurt their chances of getting the job.”If you can’t clearly articulate how you can help the company succeed or solve its problems, you’re probably not a top candidate. “It’s critical you know the specific skills and background required,” says Manciagli. “This is basic and speaks to preparation, but plenty of people don’t do it. You should say succinctly during your interview, ‘From my understanding of the job, you’re looking for these skills. Here’s how I can help.’ Then be very specific.”
3. You’re desperate – and it shows.
Some people have been out of work so long or are so desperate for the job they’ll say almost anything. That over-eagerness and anxiety, however, is a red flag. “They’ll say, ‘Sure, I can do that,’ to just about anything that comes up during the interview,” observes Michele Woodward, a career strategist in Arlington, Virginia. “The reality is they’re thinking more about paying their mortgage or affording a summer vacation than about the staffing problem the company’s trying to solve.”People also tend to ramble on and on when they’re anxious. It’s a much better plan to have short, concise answers to common questions prepared beforehand. Once you say them – smile, make good eye contact, and be quiet. 
4. You can’t answer basic questions about your qualifications.
It’s one of the most common interview questions: “What are your strengths?” Yet hiring managers say far too many job candidates flub their answers.
“Even at high levels, people will give a rote list of their previous jobs, or cite clichés like ‘I’m a workaholic and like to get things done.’ Not good enough,”says Dana Manciagli of Seattle. 
Use this opening to your best advantage. “Companies want to know why you’re a great fit for the job they have. They want details, skill sets, accomplishments. You might say, ‘I’ve exceeded my sales goals every quarter.’ Or, ‘My division brought in five new accounts in six months,’ or ‘We created three new ad programs and drove X amount of revenue.’”And when you hear, “What’s your biggest weakness?” that’s an opportunity to turn a negative into a positive. Rehearse it in advance. You might say, “In the past I’ve tended to take on too much, but by delegating I’ve been able to accomplish twice the amount.” 
5. You’re late to the interview.
“I’ve heard every excuse in the book,” says one human resources professional. “‘I got stuck in traffic.’ ‘I couldn’t find the building.’ ‘The campus is so big I got lost.’” Whatever the case, it means you didn’t give yourself enough time. “I tell clients that if they’re not in the lobby 30 minutes before the interview, they’re late.” It bears emphasis: Allow extra time.  
6. You know little or nothing about the company’s culture.Do some research. Reach out to friends and colleagues in the business. Surf for information. Ask career coaches. Is the company ultra conservative? Do staffers dress in business casual? Learn what you can – then dress for the interview accordingly. “I can always tell when a candidate hasn’t done basic homework about the culture,” says one seasoned hiring executive, “based on the way he or she looks.” When in doubt, dress up.  
7. You badmouth a previous employer.Negative attitudes attract no one – that’s the bottom line. It’s also a small world. Be careful what you say about previous places of employment, especially when your guard is down. No matter why you left a job or what your experience was, there are diplomatic ways to explain an unfortunate circumstance, even if the atmosphere (or boss, or pay, or company) was rotten. You can say you’re interested in new responsibilities, a variety of challenges, more authority, a different location – or simply that the current job posting appealed to you so strongly you couldn’t resist reaching out. 
Read more at http://www.thefiscaltimes.com/Articles/2013/05/15/The-7-Worst-Job-Interview-Job-Mistakes-People-Make.aspx#oiTF0FmhSIdrFQSd.99