This paper is about the development of a questionnaire on principal’s leadership, combining self-assessment and feedback from teachers. Being school-improvement oriented, its philosophy is mainly formative (Parylo, Zepeda & Bengtson, 2012) and its target is to support principals in improving their professional performance. The tool includes a first group of items on principal’s attitudes and motivations, taking into account the researches performed by Huber and his colleagues (Huber & Hiltmann, 2011). This is followed by a second set of items, devoted to principal’s action. They were developed taking into consideration what investigated by Robinson et al. (2007), who, on the basis of a meta-analysis defined five domains influencing positively students outcomes: 1. Establishing Goals and Expectations; 2. Strategic Resourcing; 3. Planning, Coordinating and Evaluating Teaching and the Curriculum; 4. Promoting and Participating in Teacher Learning and Development; 5. Ensuring an Orderly and Supportive Environment. Finally, we considered some well-known theories on leadership, like transformational, distributed and sustainable leadership (Leithwood & Jantzi, 1990, 2006; Harris, 2008; Hargreaves & Fink, 2012). The questionnaire was established throughout three stages (Alpha 1 and 2, Beta 1, Final). Alpha 1 was devoted to the fine-tuning of the first bulk of items and was performed individually with some principals; Alpha 2 was a pre-test performed with a small group of principals; the resulting items (Beta1) were further tested with a another group of principals. A corresponding feedback questionnaire, to be submitted to teachers and including the bulk of the principal’s “behavioural” items, was also developed. The final version of the tool will be object of a validation process with larger samples of principals and teachers in Switzerland, Italy and Chile, leading to a definitive version. The presentation and analysis of the final results will be the main object of our presentation. Since the questionnaire’s aim is formative, we plan to support the principals in their improvement journey through forms of coaching on a voluntary basis: they will indeed keep the faculty to decide if and how to employ the collected information. However, a global view on the results will be provided to the administrators, helping them in improving their knowledge of actual leadership performance in the school system.

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