112 - Discovering the how and why of school leader transformation: A mixed-methods evaluation approach

Abstract Information: Principals are critical leaders in our school systems, and since the pandemic, principalships have become more stressful and chaotic. Principal and teacher burnout, turnover, and shortages are significant challenges, with many experts now predicting that both principals and teachers will be in short supply in coming years. This session will share evaluation results from two Texas-based organizations – the George W. Bush Institute and the Holdsworth Center – who are dedicated to supporting public education and educators. The Holdsworth Center partners with public school districts to provide leadership development programs to school principals. The Bush Institute is a nonpartisan policy institution focused on ensuring opportunity for all, strengthening democracy, and advancing free societies. Both evaluations used mixed methods to tell a compelling story about how programming impacted school systems and changed leaders. Participants who attend this session will learn about: • How evaluators used qualitative data to deeply understand leader growth • An approach to systematically analyze qualitative responses from interviews, focus groups, and open-ended survey responses • How to use mixed-methods data to create a rich and meaningful narrative • What evaluators learned about how to recruit, support, and retain school leaders during challenging times.

Relevance Statement: Principals account for 25% of a school’s impact on student achievement, but each year, more than 20% retire, leave schools, or leave the profession (Grissom, Egalite, & Lindsay, 2021). Today’s principal workforce is less experienced, more mobile, work more hours, and experiences more job stress (NASSP, 2021). New principals often report that they are underprepared for their jobs. Two Texas-based nonprofit organizations took bold steps to intervene and to support school districts in developing and keeping principal talent. There is a dearth of systematic measurement approaches to understanding leader growth and how leadership programs support leader growth (Black & Ernest, 2009). This is especially true in leadership programs for school principals (Murphy et al., 2007). 360-degree reviews tend to be the primary way that leadership growth is measured when evaluating leadership programs. These reviews provide vital information from both the leader and key stakeholders, but often fail to capture context, barriers, promoters of change, or how change unfolds (Edwards & Turnbull, 2013). Behavior change rarely happens in a linear fashion and leadership growth may look different from one leader to the next or in different contexts (Cummings & Worley, 2004; Edwards & Turnbull, 2013). Researchers have suggested the use of mixed methods is necessary to evaluating leadership growth, and principal leadership specifically (Sanders, Kearney, & Vince, 2012). In this session we have employed a mixed methods approach to better understand both leadership growth in principals and the contextual factors that support principal development. In the first submission – “Supporting and keeping our principals: A mixed methods evaluation study” – data from principal, surveys, interviews, and focus groups were analyzed together to understand how systems can best support principal development. In the second submission – “Stories of principal transformation from multiple perspectives: making sense of self- and informant-reported qualitative data” – a rigorous coding strategy was applied to longitudinal qualitative data collected over a two-year period and triangulated with quantitative measures of principal success and growth. Both projects use multiple measures analysis methods to understand how principals’ leadership develops and they ways school systems and programs targeting principal leadership can support leadership growth in principals.