EdLeader Podcast - Measuring the Impact of Effective Principals featuring Dr. Anna Egalite
In the latest episode of EdLeader, Dr. Jackson sits down with Dr. Anna Egalite, coauthor of the recently released Wallace Foundation Report, "How Principals Affect Students and Schools: A Systematic Synthesis of Two Decades of Research." The researchers found that "an effective principal’s impact is stronger and broader than previously thought, making it “difficult to envision” a higher return on investment in K-12 education than the cultivation of high-quality school leadership, according to this research synthesis."
Dr. Anna Egalite has once again been ranked by Education Week’s 2021 RHSU Edu-Scholar Public Influence Rankings as one of the Top 200 education scholars who had the biggest influence on educational practice and policy in 2020. This is the second year that Dr. Egalite has earned this ranking. She was selected from a pool of more than 20,000 qualified scholars to be ranked among the Top 200.Summary of Key Findings - How Principals Affect Students and Schools
1. Effective principals are at least as important for student achievement as previous reports have concluded—and in fact, their importance may not have been stated strongly enough.
2. Principals have substantively important effects that extend beyond student achievement.
3. Effective principals orient their practice toward instructionally-focused interactions with teachers, building a productive school climate, facilitating collaboration and professional learning communities, and strategic personnel and resource management processes.
4. Principals must develop an equity lens, particularly as they are called on to meet the needs of growing numbers of marginalized students.
5. Effective principals are not equitably distributed across schools.
6. Principals are becoming more racially and ethnically diverse, but representation gaps with students are growing, which is concerning, given the payoffs to principal diversity.
7. Research on school principals is highly variable, and the field requires new investment in a rigorous, cohesive body of research. (as summarized by the NCDPI Weekly Top Ten)
Principals’ influence on student outcomes may be second to that of teachers, but principals play a critical role in influencing how teachers learn to improve their instructional techniques. When teachers pull in the same direction as the principal, good things happen for students. The
ReplyDeleteresponsibility for learning and leading within the network is shared by all members through their dispositions and interactions, though formal leaders must arrange for the rounds to occur. Principals primarily influenced student learning by fostering strong learning climates in their schools. I am deeply touched by the "fostering strong learning climates" to lay the foundations for stronger schools.