The present study focuses on one U.S. state’s effort to offer professional learning support to a group of educational leaders working in some of the state’s high-needs schools and districts. Given increasing demands on school leaders, especially with accelerated immigration across Europe and globally, the importance of principals and their supervisors (or other systems leaders) collaborating on evidence-based leadership practices is increasingly critical. 

In this study, the state hired three external vendors to each provide separate services that comprised the Nexus, an initiative charged with training participants to use the state’s new teacher evaluation system. Through the Nexus, one vendor was responsible for delivering evidence-based content aligned to the teacher evaluation system; another leveraged content to coach principal supervisors; and, the final vendor was similarly designated to coach principals. Collectively, these various services were intended to enhance district- and school-level leadership capacities to improve instruction and to aid educational leaders in better using the teacher evaluation system. For the purposes of this proposal, we center on the how principal supervisors engaged principals over the course of the first year of the Nexus.

As principals’ roles have changed, shifting from an emphasis on operations to instruction, the work of systems leaders like supervisors has also shifted to attend more to supporting principals in reaching higher levels of equity and excellence in student outcomes (Honig & Rainey, 2020). The district office’s support of principals’ professional development has evolved from a focus on supervision to one focused on coaching, mentoring, and partnering (Johnson & Chrispeels, 2010). To meet principals’ ongoing professional learning needs, many districts have started to reconceptualize the principal supervisor role to support principals’ efforts to lead and improve schools (Goldring et al., 2018). Within the context of preparing to implement the state’s new teacher evaluation system, we asked the following questions for the present study:

1. How, if at all, did principal supervisors report supporting their principals?
2. How, if at all, did principals report being supported by their principal supervisors?
3. In what ways did principal supervisor and principal reports of supports align or diverge?

Brief Review of Relevant Literature and Conceptual Framing

Bryk and colleagues (2010) organize educational leader responsibilities into three areas: managerial, instructional, and inclusive-facilitative. The second area—instructional—charges educational leaders with helping teachers enhance their skills to, in turn, enhance student learning. Teacher skills can markedly differ, so educational leaders must work to understand how to best support each teacher (Hoppey & McLeskey, 2013). Teacher evaluation systems are one way that educational leaders can help teachers improve instruction (Donaldson & Mavrogordato, 2018). Recent policy changes in some states have sought to redesign teacher evaluation systems to be more growth-oriented, a key feature of which calls for educational leaders providing teachers with high-quality, relevant feedback (Ford & Hewitt, 2020).

Many educational leaders have turned to in-service professional learning as a way to keep current (e.g., Grissom & Harrington, 2010), but much of the extant literature base on the topic examines professional learning for teachers rather than educational leaders (Wright & da Costa, 2016). Acknowledging this outsized focus on teachers, the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) of 2015 emphasized the importance of high-quality educational leaders and permitted states to set aside federal grant funds specifically to develop educational leader abilities in a range of areas, such as evaluating teachers (De Voto & Reedy, 2021). While some states opted not to set aside funds, an increasing number of states have expended time and energy on strengthening the quality of their educational leaders—often through pre-service preparation programs and in-service professional learning initiatives.

The present study is one part of a larger a convergent exploratory mixed-methods study of the Nexus (Creswell & Plano Clark, 2011). The Nexus included 19 principals, six principal supervisors, 11 staff members from three vendors, and four SEA officials (N = 40). For the present study, we collected data from all participants except three of the 19 principals (N = 37). Data collection. Data sources consisted of surveys, interviews, observations, and documents, which permitted us to triangulate and enrich findings (Creswell, 2015). We administered four surveys to principals and principal supervisors during the 2021-2022 school year (September, January, March, May) (Dillman, 2009). Surveys were administered online and comprised two sections: (a) Nexus coherence, and (b) principals’ perceptions of quality of 22 areas of support from principal supervisors. We also conducted two rounds of semi-structured interviews (September, February) (Patton, 1990). Vendor staff members and SEA officials were interviewed during both rounds while principals and principal supervisors were interviewed once during the second round. Interviews were conducted via Zoom, audio recorded, and transcribed. We also conducted non-participant observations of monthly Nexus meetings (N = 8). Finally, we collected related documents from the Nexus’s various meetings (e.g., handouts). Data analysis. We conducted descriptive survey data analyses, comparing perceptions over time. For all other data sources, we devised an integrated coding scheme (Bradley et al., 2007) and employed open coding with deductive codes derived from extant literature and MPSPS. We wrote qualitative memos (Birks et al., 2008) and iteratively analyzed data as we collected data, both of which guided future coding efforts (Saldaña, 2009). Finally, we engaged in the data reduction process (Miles & Huberman, 1994) by refining codes, removing redundancies, and collapsing open codes in order to devise evidentiary assertions.

Results RQ1: The support principal supervisors provided to principals they supervised decreased over time. Further, principal supervisors reported offering less differentiated support to principals as the school year progressed. In general, few responding principal supervisors reported offering much differentiated support to principals except for providing principals with professional development on instructional efforts to improve teacher effectiveness. RQ2: Most responding principals indicated receiving at least “some support” from their principal supervisors regarding reviewing observational data from the school and receiving purposeful, goal-aligned, actionable feedback. Most responding principals also reported a shift to more “significant support” in receiving coaching on instructional leadership activities and observing my supervisor model instructional leadership behaviors over time. RQ3: On average, responding principal supervisors reported offering more support than principals reported receiving. Specifically, responding principal supervisors felt they offered support to principals in the form of modeling reflective practice and instructional leadership behaviors; yet, responding principals did not report receiving these supports at the same level. Discussion, Significance, and Application to the 2025 ECER Theme Our results suggest that Nexus participants might have benefited by having a common definition of what adequate supports from a principal supervisor to a principal is and should be. Given ECER’s focus on leveraging research for “charting the way forward,” the mismatch between what systems leaders and principals reported understanding, receiving, and deploying suggest that overarching entities (like the state, in this study), must improve how it creates conditions for leaders at varying levels to make sense of learning for productive collaboration. Although the Nexus, as an SEA-led professional learning initiative, is a commendable effort to organize various vendors to enhance leadership capacities across levels, ongoing efforts to increase programming continuity around clear standards, definitions, and measures can be one way to reimagine how equitable instructional practices are embedded throughout school systems.

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