The intersection of school leadership, political capital, and cognitive space

Many studies exploring the relationship between principals and teachers typically address micro-politics (e.g., control, empowerment, factions, negotiation, and resistance), teacher efficacy (e.g., adoption, maladaption, self-interests, and various emotional states), and leadership models (e.g., authoritarian, distributive, participatory, shared, and so on). These studies often treat the expectations for classroom practice as clear and well-understood by the leadership, the delivery of professional development as sufficiently substantial, and additional support for teachers as timely and knowledgeable. These studies show--and have helped secure in the minds of many progressive educational scholars and organizational behaviorists--that the difficulty in school improvement is usually attributable to the intractability of people in general, the intractability of teachers in particular, and political self-interests thereof. This study explores and explicates the practices, strategies and policies which principals rely upon to mobilize a whole-school change effort. To establish a rigorous study, I used a case study analysis of three individual principals, each leading a whole-school change effort within the same policy context: a district mandate of classroom practices deemed necessary to improve student achievement. I analyzed each principal's use of power and authority to shape the change effort at his school, his engagement of teachers in the new work, and the teachers' responses to his change effort. My findings suggest that while district officials mandate a school redesign, no one adopts the expectations without question or adaptation. Instead, numerous interactions around the mandate and its features are what create--and ultimately institute--the new work practices. Thus, the principal's engagement of teachers and their responses are part of a constellation of interactions that make meaning out of and ultimately realize a district mandate. Moreover, my findings suggest that teachers with greater political capital--owing to their record of student results on district and state examinations--found the principal and campus specialists supportive. Teachers with little political capital--because their students continued to perform inadequately on standardized examinations--experienced little support in changing their practice. This research suggests that favorability or symmetry of campus relationships of power shapes the cognitive space for teachers learning new classroom practices.