School principals are responsible for balancing the logistical demands of running a school while simultaneously supervising instruction. Additionally, in the Texas school system, they must contend with rising academic standards for students and an increasingly complex accountability system that focuses on traditionally underserved student…

In states that fund public prekindergarten and kindergarten in elementary schools, principals are central to ensuring these programs support children's learning and development. Yet few studies explore how principals position these programs within their instructional leadership and what they perceive should be done by district leaders to support…

Assistant principals are essential to the campus leadership team as instructional leaders. However, many assistant principals spend most of their day participating in noninstructional leadership duties and responsibilities. This can drastically reduce the assistant principal's ability to fulfill instructional leadership duties, thus negatively…

This paper offers a meta-analysis scoping study of doctoral dissertations completed in the last 20 years in one doctoral programme of Educational Leadership (EL) at a higher education institution in Texas, aiming at identifying topical foci, epistemology, methodology and main themes. Therefore, we systematically collected, documented, securitised…

The purpose of this qualitative descriptive study was to explore how teacher leaders describe principal behaviors on their organizational empowerment. The sample was composed of 12 teacher leaders from a school district in Southwest Texas. Volunteers were selected using purposive and snowball sampling. Guided by the path-goal theory of leadership,…

Leadership strategies of high school basketball coaches and its influence on early adolescents' athletic outcomes was not well understood. The transformational and transactional leadership theory underpinned this qualitative descriptive study, exploring how high school basketball coaches who believe they are enacting transformational or…

Principal workloads and demands are steadily increasing while principal health and well-being are declining, resulting in increased rates of principal turnover. Currently, principals are experiencing numerous work-related stressors that are increasing burnout. In many cases, school leaders are sacrificing their families and health to lead their…

Although school districts have prepared and planned for school crises for many years in response to the Columbine High School and Sandy Hook Elementary school shooting tragedies, the COVID-19 pandemic brought new challenges for school districts when dealing with educating students amid a pandemic. This qualitative phenomenological study examined…

This qualitative case study explored assistant principals' practices in instructional leadership. This study was conducted in two small school districts in the South Texas Region 1 area. Research questions included (a) What instructional leadership behaviors are assistant principals in Region 1 engaged in? (b) What support is needed for assistant…

In this article, I examine how a sample of principals in Texas and West Virginia made sense of the learning experiences of kindergarteners and how such sensemaking appeared to affect them as instructional leaders. Examining these issues creates the opportunity to consider the types of support school leaders might need to address the changing…

Using rich Texas administrative data, we estimate the impact of middle school principals on post-secondary schooling, employment, and criminal justice outcomes. The results highlight the importance of school leadership, though striking differences emerge in the relative importance of different skill dimensions to different outcomes. The estimates…

Principals' roles have been transformed from solely managerial and now include instructional leadership. Principals were formerly responsible for hiring teachers, communicating the vision and mission for the school, and overseeing the daily operations. Currently, the primary focus of school principals is student achievement for all students. The…

English learners account for 21.7% of the Texas public school system (Texas Education Agency, 2022). This qualitative study was conducted to examine how teachers of English learners in a dual language program perceived the educational supports they received affected student achievement in science. Teacher participants were asked about their…

This phenomenological study focused on examining how administrative support leads to successful environments conducive to prominent levels of teacher leadership. The purpose of this study was to research teacher leaders' perspectives on how administrative trust supported their role at elementary schools in an East Texas suburban district. The…

The empirical research examining the effects of virtual mentoring and coaching (VMC) on principal leadership development is limited. Furthermore, little is known about school leaders who engage in virtual professional leadership learning communities (VPLCs) and how much school leaders grow with VPLCs who are also receiving VMC at the same time.…