US principals’ sensemaking of the future roles and responsibilities of school principals

Abstract

School principals are fundamentally important to school improvement. Due in part to this importance, the roles and responsibilities of school principals are constantly evolving. To explore leader sensemaking about this phenomenon I conducted 30 interviews with 10 public school principals in the US state of New Jersey during the 2018–2019 school year. Specifically, in this study I asked: (a) What are current public school principals’ predictions of the future role of school principals? and (b) In what way(s) do these predictions shape principals’ thinking about remaining in the profession? The findings of this work indicate: (a) principals believe the future of the school principal will focus heavily on safety and security; (b) principals believe the future of the role will include an increased emphasis on supporting student and teacher emotion and mental health; and (c) principals believe their future role as a school leader will evolve in how they interact with parents/guardians. Finally, an analysis of data shows in some cases how principals make sense of the future of the profession shapes their thinking about remaining in or exiting the role of school principal. Implications for policy and practice are discussed.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 59 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.