How Principals and Peers Influence Teaching and Learning

Abstract

This paper examines the effects of principal leadership and peer teacher influence on teachers’ instructional practice and student learning. Using teacher survey and student achievement data from a mid-sized urban southeastern school district in the United States in 2006-2007, the study employs multilevel structural equation modeling to examine the structural relationships between student learning and theorized dimensions of principal leadership,teacher peer influence, and change in teachers’ instructional practice. The findings confirm previous empirical work and provide new contributions to research on the chain of hypothesized relationships between leadership practice and student learning. Both principal leadership and teacher peer influence were significantly associated with teachers’ instructional practices and English language arts (ELA) student learning. A major contribution of this research is the strong and significant indirect relationships which mediate education leadership and student learning. The results indicate the importance of principals work for student learning because of their indirect influence on teachers’ practices through the fostering of collaboration and communication around instruction.

Keywords

leadership impacts, distributed leadership, instructional improvement, student learning, multilevel structural modeling

1University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA

Corresponding Author:

Jonathan Supovitz, University of Pennsylvania, Graduate School of Education, 3700 Walnut

Street #404, Philadelphia, PA 19104

Email: jons@gse.upenn.edu

 

The literature on the effects of school leadership on student learning stretches back for at least 40 years. The accumulation of that literature suggests that although principals can have a detectable effect on student performance, their effects are mostly mediated through other aspects of school life that influence what and how teachers teach in classrooms. More recent explorations of leadership have incorporated a range of other leadership activities in schools—mostly leadership enacted by teachers and other “informal” school leaders—that influence instructional practice. In this study we combine these two trends and examine the effects of both principal leadership and peer influence on teachers’ instructional practice and student learning. Using a data set collected from a school district in the southeastern United States that allows us to connect teachers’ survey data to students’learning outcomes, we are able to examine the relationships between both teacher perceptions of principal practice as well as peer influence on student learning, as mediated by instructional practice. We find that both leadership practice and peer influence are related to teacher instructional practice, which, in our data set, is significantly related to English language arts (ELA) achievement but not mathematics achievement. Furthermore, teacher reports of peer influence had an equivalent influence in ELA and a 2 times greater impact in mathematics on teachers’ practice than do teacher reports of principal leadership activity. However, principal leadership also influences instructional practice indirectly by significantly affecting how teachers report the influence of their peers.

Literature Review

Principal Leadership and Its Effects on Student Achievement

There have been several thorough reviews of the literature on the relationship between school leadership—mostly defined as the efforts and activities of school principals—and student outcomes. Hallinger and Heck (1998) synthesized 43 studies conducted between 1980 and 1995 that investigated evidence of the relationship between principal leadership and student achievement. They organized the studies into three categories: direct effects of leadership practice on student outcomes; mediated effects studies, in which principal leadership was mediated by other people, events, or organizational factors; and reciprocal effect studies, in which the relationships between leadership efforts and school and environmental factors were interactive. The authors saw little evidence of direct effects and few examples of reciprocal effects studies, with most evidence pointing to indirect effects. They concluded that principals have a measurable, but indirect, effect on school effectiveness and student achievement. A second synthesis of the literature on the relationship between school leadership practices and student outcomes was conducted by Waters, Marzano, and McNulty (2003), who synthesized 70 research studies relating principal leadership to student achievement that were conducted from the early 1970s through the early 2000s. The studies they examined looked at a wide array of leadership responsibilities, including a focus on school culture, faculty motivation, instructional support, and emphasis on accountability. They produced effects sizes for each of the different dimensions of leadership that were examined. Across these disparate studies, they found an average effect size of .25 and concluded that “there is, in fact, a substantial relationship between leadership and student achievement” (p. 3). Witziers, Bosker, and Kruger (2003) conducted a quantitative meta-analysis of studies that looked at the overall effects of school leadership on student learning as well as studies that examined the impact of specific principal behaviors on student outcomes. They found small direct effects across studies of elementary school principal leadership but no detectable direct impacts of secondary school principal leadership. They found larger effects, although with more variability, in studies of more specific leadership behaviors. A more holistic analysis of a wide range of leadership literature was conducted by Leithwood, Seashore Louis, Anderson, and Wahlstrom (2004). They developed a conceptual model of how leadership at different levels of the education system (state, district, other stakeholders) influenced school leadership, which interacted with school and student conditions to produce student outcomes. Through a synthesis of both the quantitative and qualitative studies of these factors, they concluded that school leadership “is second only to teaching among school-related factors in its impact on student learning” (p. 5). One particular empirical study of principal leadership was particularly relevant to our work, because of both its focus and the methods it employed. Hallinger, Bickman, and Davis (1996) examined the relationship between principal leadership and student reading achievement using structural equation modeling (SEM). SEM allowed them to simultaneously test the independent effects of multiple antecedent and intervening variables. They found no direct effects between indicators of principal leadership and student performance. They then explored the ways that school and classroom variables mediated the relationship between principal leadership and student achievement. They found that principal leadership significantly predicted variables of instructional climate and instructional organization and that those variables were positively and significantly related to student achievement. In summary, the accumulated literature on the relationship between principal practice and student learning indicates two things. First is a confirmation that principals can have a detectable effect on student learning outcomes. And