The Change Leader.

Abstract

Effective school leaders are key to large-scale, sustainable education reform. For some time, educators have believed that principals must be instructional leaders if they are to be the effective leaders needed for sustained innovation. Newmann, King, and Youngs (2000), for example, found that school capacity is the crucial variable affecting instructional quality and corresponding student achievement. And at the heart of school capacity are principals focused on the development of teachers ’ knowledge and skills, professional community, program coherence, and technical resources. Fink and Resnick (2001) examined school districts ’ efforts to develop principals into instructional leaders who could achieve a large-scale turnaround in literacy and numeracy. They described some core strategies for developing the role of the principal as instructional leader, including five mutually reinforcing sets of strategic activities: nested learning communities, principal institutes, leadership for instruction, peer learning, and individual coaching. Characterizing instructional leadership as the principal’s central role has been a valuable first step in increasing student learning, but it does not go far enough. Literacy and mathematics improvements are only the beginning. To ensure deeper learning – to encourage problem solving and thinking skills and to develop and nurture highly motivated and engaged learners, for example – requires mobilizing the

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