Blazing New Trails - Connexions

Complexities in the Workload of Principals: Implications for Teacher Leadership 31
Principals face stress that can cause them to consider the benefits and limitations of
their career choice. For example, Pounder and Merrill (2001) reported:
How much can I afford to sacrifice in terms of my personal life and overall quality of
life to fulfill my desire to achieve or influence education and to make more money? Or
similarly, how much more money do I need to make to be worth the loss of personal
life time? (p. 47)
As principal candidates consider these workload-associated issues, the decision to pursue the
principalship increases in difficulty.
Lashway (2003) listed the complexity of the job, the isolation, the lonely work, with
the particulars of the entrenched culture of each individual school, and the endemic sources of
conflict as leading stressors that principals face. The complexity of the job of principal and
the variety of internal and external demands on the principals’ performance reveal a mosaic of
one that is challenging, fast-paced, and isolating.
Teacher leadership provides interesting insights for understanding the work of
principals (York-Barr & Duke, 2004). A number of researchers, such as Cochran-Smith and
Lytle (1999), Crowther, Kaagan, Ferguson, and Hann (2008), Katzenmeyer and Moller
(2001), Muijs and Harris (2003), Reeves, (2008), Rogus (1988), and York-Barr and Duke
(2004) have noted that teacher leadership is associated with the hope for the continuously
evolving professionalism of teachers. Thus, teacher leadership can change the culture of the
school, especially if principals recognize and respect teachers as partners in important,
instructional decision making in the school. In this way, teacher leadership provides
interesting insights for understanding the work of principals.
THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK
Instructional leadership and transformational leadership are two models that have
dominated educational leadership literature (Hallinger, 1992). Instructional leadership
appeared in the literature in the 1980s as research about the effectiveness of principals who
had a focus and expectation for instructional effectiveness permeated the literature (Lashway,
2002).
Transformational leadership utilizes stakeholders to improve student achievement by
means of problem analysis and resolution, resulting in educational change (Hallinger, 1992).
In transformational leadership, principals emphasize improvement of the skill level of
teachers; in doing so, they challenge teachers to think about pedagogical practices and the
professional growth of teachers (Hallinger, 1992). Despite the emphasis on educational
change, the use of transformational leadership is not a guarantee for instructional leadership
(Hallinger & Leithwood, 1998).
Marks and Printy (2003) introduced a third model of leadership, integrated leadership,
which embodies the concepts of instructional and transformational leadership. Since
principals are responsible for improved student achievement, teaching effectiveness, and
capacity building in the organization, we chose the integrated leadership model to explain the
roles we were envisioning for educational leaders. Marks and Printy stated, “When principals
who are transformational leaders accept their instructional role and exercise it in collaboration
with teachers, they practice an integrated form of leadership” (p. 376). Therefore, in this
study, we use integrated leadership as a construct to measure the new expectations of