Instructional Leadership

Good instructional leadership is important because it represents the prioritization of learning in a school system. The literature has highlighted the importance of having an instructional leader—usually the school principal or a district employee—to provide pedagogical support to teachers. One important aspect of instructional leadership involves identifying struggling teachers and students and providing them the support they need to improve. A common and effective way is to use classroom observations to diagnose teachers’ strengths and weaknesses in order to provide targeted feedback on how to improve pedagogical skills (Beisiegel, Mitchell, & Hill 2018; McDuffie et al. 2014; Walkoe 2015). Interventions like classroom observations and frequent feedback can improve instructional quality and thus indirectly impact learning (Bruns et al. 2018; Fryer 2017), especially when complemented with incentives and/or student learning information to guide instruction (Fryer 2017; de Hoyos et al. 2017; Dee & Wyckoff 2015; Gitomer et al. 2015).  Therefore, instructional leadership goes beyond the bureaucratic management of the school and instead provides support to the teacher-student relationship to ensure that learning takes place. Abundant evidence suggests that sustained provision of coaching and instructional leadership that is tailored to teachers’ specific needs results in significant student learning gains (Evans & Popova 2016; Evans & Betaille 2019; Kraft et al. 2018; Murnane & Ganimian 2014a; Conn 2014; Darling-Hammond et al. 2017).