While the significance of principals' roles is widely recognized, and the impactful behaviors of principals are empirically delineated, little is known about whether principals spend time in an impactful way, whether principals' time use varies across different school contexts, or whether principals' time use is related to critical school…

Effective school leadership is key to students' academic success. But the development of effective school leadership has been seriously hampered by the lack of technically sound tools to assess and monitor leaders' performance. This article presents the research base and conceptual framework for a leadership assessment instrument under…

Explores basic leadership concepts, demolishes three leadership myths, and advises principals concerning ways to vary their management styles using either directive or interactive behavior. Choice of style depends on the situation and a particular subordinate's degree of readiness or compliance. (MLH)

Ten behaviors that can signal that principals are experiencing harmful levels of stress are discussed and possible solutions identified. The behaviors include prioritizing responsibilities inappropriately, responding negatively to work situations, becoming detached, and using time ineffectively. (PGD)

Administrator succession can have varied effects on organizational performance. Although most studies have focused on performance outcomes, this paper reports the personal sense making of a successor to the principalship. The successor found that leadership validation and attribution influenced her transformation from an interloper to an effective…

The Excellent Principal Inventory is a unique evaluation instrument that enables principals to obtain confidential performance feedback from superiors, peers, and teachers. Five research-based commitments (to student success, teaching and learning, the school staff, innovation, and leadership) reflect the values and behaviors developed for the…

Principals are confronted daily with opportunities to choose either bureaucratic or nonbureaucratic leadership behaviors. Effective principals make a conscious leadership choice, recognizing that the options have paradoxical implications and produce different school cultures. In the process, new administrator role definitions are emerging.…

Pulling up stakes is seldom the best way to handle difficult people at work, because they exist everywhere as bullies, "yes" people, whiners, nonentities, know-it-alls, or "no" people. This article examines these six personality types and tells how administrators can avoid being victimized. (MLH)

Explores how principals use some of the discretionary resources at their command to come to an accommodation with problems of resource inadequacy, challenges to authority, and conflicting role expectations. Uses the framework provided by the theory of street-level bureaucracy. (Author/IRT)

Although listening is the most widely used communication skill, it is rarely taught. This study of California and Arkansas principals explored how principals and their staffs perceived the principals' listening behaviors. Results suggest that principals and their staffs perceived the principals to be moderately good listeners. Includes 11…

Summarizes a study exploring how teachers characterize their administrators' supervisory behaviors and administrator-teacher relationships, including how administrators show respect for teachers. Four distinct supervisor patterns (backstage, collaborative, surly, and imperial) emerged. Data indicate a correlation between principals' respect for…

K.E. Ferguson's analysis of women's place in capitalist society and the concurrent elevation of bureaucratic structures seriously challenges administration analysts. According to Ferguson, modern bureaucracy requires constant maintenance in reifying its dominance structure and locating and suppressing opposition. This analysis can be applied to…

The first 2 of the 12 publications reviewed in this annotated bibliography describe what principals actually do as instructional leaders. The first document reports on habits and values evinced by eight schools whose principals were viewed as proficient instructional leaders. Although several distinct leadership styles emerged, the ethic of…

Findings from an exploratory study asking 10 principals and 280 teachers about connections between principals' leadership behaviors and teachers' sense of efficacy in middle schools involved in change indicate that there is a significant difference between general teaching efficacy and personal teaching efficacy. Principal behaviors related to…

This study explores the influence of personal values in problem-solving processes used by elementary school principals responding to the introduction of computers to their schools. Hodgkinson's values hierarchy was used to define actions that more rational frameworks might dismiss or explain inadequately. The hierarchy included three types of…