Thursday, August 2, 4:00-4:30, SUB Room 233, Theme: Leadership

This presentation reports on an ongoing research study funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada that examines the role of teaching principals in rural, remote and northern schools in Canada. The research has a multi-method design conducted in four phases, but for this presentation, we report on the latest results of observations and interviews with rural teaching principals in Alberta, Saskatchewan, and Manitoba. We frame the study utilizing common frameworks of instructional leadership amidst principal leadership standards in the three provinces. Our preliminary findings indicate that teaching principals tend to equate instructional leadership with time visiting classrooms, but in fact, teaching principals engage in many other instructional leadership practices that they may not define as “instructional leadership." This presentation focuses on the effects of expectations of instructional leadership (self and leadership models) on principal self-efficacy, as well as the ways in which rural teaching principals are enacting instructional leadership in their communities through the testing and modeling of teaching and learning innovations, collaborative planning and professional growth, creative scheduling and programming opportunities, and working with community to provide learning opportunities.