Blazing New Trails - Connexions

250 CRITICAL ISSUES IN SCHOOL IMPROVEMENT
Instructional Leadership
REVIEW OF THE LITERATURE
Instructional leadership as the role of the principal has moved from administration and
management to leadership, and the responsibilities for ensuring student achievement and
success have fallen directly on the shoulders of the principal (DiPaola & Hoy, 2008).
Principals are no longer simply managers of the campus, but they have also become the
leaders of classroom instruction. This role has been defined in terms of setting a vision for
success and changing the campus culture to focus on student achievement and school success.
Fullan (1993) defined instructional leadership as, “…designers, stewards, and teachers. They
are responsible for building organizations where people continually expand their capabilities
to understand complexity, clarify vision, and improve shared mental models—that is, they are
responsible for learning” (p. 71). Deal and Peterson (2009) expressed instructional leadership
in terms of changing the culture of the campus to focus on student learning and achievement.
Instructional leadership is a combination of principal roles focused on instructional
teacher actions. These roles include supervising teacher instruction, providing effective
professional development for teachers, and providing curriculum development (Blasé &
Blasé, 2004). This definition would indicate that principals must know how to effectively
evaluate teaching effectiveness, connect instruction to the curriculum, and then be able to
guide teachers in professional development opportunities that improve classroom instruction.
These definitions are similar in two aspects; they focus on the leader as the change agent,
and they view the role of the principal as the supporter and facilitator of instruction through his or
her leadership. As the educational community has evolved, so has the role of the principal in
leading. More emphasis is now placed on supervision and evaluation of classroom instruction
(DiPaola & Hoy, 2008). This new shift is a more narrow focus on the principal’s understanding of
how to help teachers become more effective in the classroom. Since the curriculum guides
classroom instruction, principals today must become more focused on the development and implementation
of the curriculum in order to ensure effective teacher instruction (DiPaola & Hoy, 2008).
Curriculum Leadership
Curriculum has been defined historically in terms of documents or coursework used to
guide classroom instruction. More recently, curriculum has been defined in terms of actions
and outcomes aligned with classroom instruction (Wiles & Bondi, 2011). This shift in
curriculum, from inactive to active, has placed an emphasis on student outcomes or
achievement instead of just a set of written standards. Wiles and Bondi (2011) stated, “We see
the curriculum as a desired goal or set of values that can be activated through a development
process, culminating in experiences for learners” (p. 5). This change in active curriculum
would then necessitate a change in the role of the principal as an active leader of curriculum.
Just as instructional leadership has been defined in a variety of ways in the literature,
so has curriculum leadership. Fiore (2004) stated that in order to turn schools around,
principals must have an understanding of the curriculum that guides classroom instruction.
According to DiPaola and Hoy (2008), effective principals should have the knowledge, skills
and understanding of the curriculum. This includes the development, implementation,
articulation and evaluation of the curriculum. The primary difference noted in the literature
between the instructional leader and the curriculum leader is the depth and understanding of
the skills and content being taught in the classroom.