The responsibilities of school principals in the United States have shifted to include instructional leadership in addition to the management of facilities and people. Principals at all levels can find it challenging to balance their administrative and instructional leadership roles. The purpose of this basic qualitative study was to understand…

The study focused on the impact of scheduling configurations on schools' middle-level social studies test performance levels and "barriers" affecting time allocated for social studies. Results of South Carolina's accountability assessment system's social studies seventh-grade performance levels in 117 schools, as well as a survey…

The persistent concern of stakeholders in the education sector over the dwindling academic performance of students in Nigerian secondary schools could be attributed to the perceived inadequacies in instructional time management. This study therefore investigated principals' instructional time management strategies, teachers' effectiveness in…

Research over the past 35 years consistently reveals that principals spend minimal amounts of time on instructional leadership activities. Similarly, we know very little about how principals might be trained to change their time allocation to focus more on instructional leadership tasks. The paper describes the implementation and the time use of…

Part of the Stanford Center for Opportunity Policy in Education (SCOPE) research series titled "Teachers' Time: Collaborating for Learning, Teaching, and Leading," this case study looks at Pagosa Springs Elementary School, which is located in the Town of Pagosa Springs, Colorado. The school serves students in kindergarten through fourth…

The No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 increases school accountability and requires educators to improve student academic outcomes using evidence-based practice. One factor that contributes to desirable school outcomes is principals' instructional leadership behaviors. Principals who allocate more time to instructional leadership behaviors are more…

Part of the Stanford Center for Opportunity Policy in Education (SCOPE) research series titled "Teachers' Time: Collaborating for Learning, Teaching, and Leading," this case study looks at the Santa Monica Alternative School House (SMASH), a K-8 public school in the Santa Monica-Malibu Unified School District (SMMUSD). It is a school of…

This leadership framework, based on practices employed by some the nation's most successful principals, can be used to diagnose and address school needs. The framework is excerpted from "Breakthrough Principals" © 2016 by Jean Desravines, Jaime Aquino, Benjamin Fenton, and New Leaders, published by Jossey-Bass, a Wiley brand. The…

Qualitative research was conducted in a large suburban school district implementing co-teaching as a new service delivery model for special education. Researchers examined the changes that resulted from the new service delivery model using a socio-technical systems lens. This framework views schools as open systems that contain a structural, task,…

Teacher professional development is one of the most powerful influences on student achievement, and professional learning communities can be an excellent vehicle for high-quality PD. Mindich and Lieberman examine ways to implement effective PLCs. Education research has found that collegial work is connected to teachers' professional growth and…

Social studies at the middle-level represented a marginalized discipline in South Carolina. Although it was integrated into the state's accountability testing agenda and weighted equally with English, math, and science content in state school and district report card rating calculations, differences exist in the amount of time allocated for social…

Education reform has been on a new path over the last 15 years; a path that leads to more accountability, more choice for students and parents, highly qualified teachers, as well as, best practices in instruction. In an effort to move along the path of reform and as a result of previous reform, the 2004 reauthorization of IDEA reviewed the field…

From setting the stage to engaging the community in understanding the purpose of collaborative professional learning teams, this volume covers what leaders need to know to implement more effective professional learning. Chapters focus on changing school culture, scheduling time, planning, using data, designs for professional learning, facilitating…

A harried leader is not a helpful leader. Schools need calm, well-balanced, helpful leaders as much as they need visionary ones. In fact, in this era of frenetic change in schools, principals should devote at least as much time to helping teachers be more focused and less frantic as they do to formulating new visions for the school or embarking on…

Provides time management strategies for principals who also teach. Advises organizing schedules, files, and materials, delegating routine tasks, coordinating forms and aadministrative structures, communicating directly and through conversational memos, building a cooperative staff, planning for systematic performance evaluation, and other hints.…