Conceptualizing Alberta District Leadership Practices: A Cross Case Analysis

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Conceptualizing Alberta District Leadership Practices: A Cross Case Analysis a

George J. Bedard & Carmen P. Mombourquette

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University of Lethbridge, Lethbridge, Canada Published online: 27 Apr 2015.

Click for updates To cite this article: George J. Bedard & Carmen P. Mombourquette (2015): Conceptualizing Alberta District Leadership Practices: A Cross Case Analysis, Leadership and Policy in Schools, DOI: 10.1080/15700763.2014.997936 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/15700763.2014.997936

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Leadership and Policy in Schools, 00:1–23, 2015 Copyright © Taylor & Francis Group, LLC ISSN: 1570-0763 print/1744-5043 online DOI: 10.1080/15700763.2014.997936

Conceptualizing Alberta District Leadership Practices: A Cross Case Analysis GEORGE J. BEDARD and CARMEN P. MOMBOURQUETTE

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University of Lethbridge, Lethbridge, Canada

We interviewed 45 district-level staff, principals, and trustees in two high-performing and one rapidly improving Alberta school districts. We asked interviewees to detail the what and the how of key leadership practices to promote and sustain student achievement and how they had changed over the last five to ten years. The cross-case findings are clustered around four practices that respondents described and strongly endorsed: (1) collaboration between school- and district-level leadership in setting the direction in leadership for learning; (2) development of a shared expertise in the uses of evidence about student learning; (3) provision of professional development that is job-embedded and based on school needs; and (4) alignment of an array of practices and structures to support student learning.

INTRODUCTION While much research on school-level impacts on student achievement has been generated over the last two decades, the district-level focus on this connection has been relatively untapped until of late (Leithwood, 2009, 2012; Leithwood, Seashore Louis, Anderson, & Wahlstrom, 2004). Much of what we knew about district effects came from American sources, as well as two earlier Canadian studies supplementing this perspective (LaRocque & Coleman, 1990; Maguire, 2003). A more recent Canadian study asserts that school districts function as critical mediating agencies between provincial governments and schools, and that district leadership is the key link in a multi-constituent effort for school improvement (Sheppard, Brown, & Address correspondence to George J. Bedard, University of Lethbridge, Faculty of Education, 4401 University Drive, Lethbridge, AB T1K 3M4, Canada. E-mail: george.bedard@ uleth.ca 1

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Dibbon, 2009). Current research on district effects in the United States has begun to plumb the specific practices that districts have fashioned to address and support achievement results (Honig, 2012). Building on this recent trend, we present a cross-case study of three districts in Alberta that aims to deepen Canadian empirical research on the relationship between district leadership practices and student achievement and to offer a conceptual framework that analyzes those practices.

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FRAMEWORK AND METHODOLOGY This cross-case analysis is derived from a larger study undertaken by the authors (Bedard, Mombourquette, & Aitken, 2013a, 2013b; Mombourquette, Bedard, & Aitken, 2013). Despite significant growth in urban areas over the last decade, the typology of school districts in Alberta is dominated by largely rural and mixed rural-urban varieties, and on that basis we chose one urban and two rural districts. We chose the three districts for the study based on Alberta Education–generated student achievement data over five or more years. We asked respondents to detail the what and the how of the key leadership practices in their work with school-based educators to promote and sustain student achievement, supplemented by other questions germane to this topic. Gaining access to respondents was greatly facilitated by the cooperation of the College of Alberta School Superintendents (CASS), the professional association to which district-level leaders belong and which has been very active in the capacity building of its members to address student achievement issues. Interviewing district staff, principals, and trustees allowed us to utilize a type of triangulation, in that what district leaders told us about leadership practices found a high degree of validation in the perceptions and descriptions of principals and trustees. However, we acknowledge that a more robust form of triangulation would necessitate a research design that incorporates observations of district leaders in action, such as that carried out by Honig, Copland, Rainey, Lorton, and Newton (2010). We adapted the framework of leadership practices based on a concurrent study of several districts in Ontario by Dr. Kenneth Leithwood (Professor Emeritus, Ontario Institute for Studies in Education at The University of Toronto).1 In this article, we focus on selective elements of the wider study: direction setting, uses of evidence, professional development, and alignment. A case study “is an in depth exploration of a bounded system” (Creswell, 2002, p. 485), separated out for study—in this context, beginning with separate case studies of three Alberta school districts in which interview data were the main sources of information, supplemented by document analysis. In this article, these findings are re-analyzed in a cross-case comparison. In the latter context, this approach conforms to what Creswell (2002), citing

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Stake (1995), describes as “a collective case study . . . in which multiple cases are described and compared to provide insight into an issue” (p. 485). The issue here is district leadership practices that elevate and sustain student achievement. The aim in this article is to provide a foundational description of district leadership practices of three successful districts in Alberta. This description and analysis may be helpful to spur on other research about the role of district leadership in Alberta, and in Canada generally, as well as for comparison purposes with American research on the same topic. We used three different interview protocols: one for district-level educators, one for principals, and one for trustees. When appropriate, there was some overlap in the questions posed to district staff and principals. Typically, interviews with district staff ranged from one to two hours, with principals in the one-hour range, and with trustees from 45 minutes to one hour. The researchers interviewed respondents, with rare exceptions, face-to-face: 21 district-level staff, 18 principals, and 6 trustees. We conducted two interviews by email and two by telephone because of time and distance constraints. In the wider study, the semi-structured interviewing and recording of respondents, transcribing the data, the analyzing of findings, and the writing of three cases was accomplished from November 2010 to June 2011. Out of this process we produced 110 single-spaced pages of description focusing on three separate cases, with document analysis related to district context and student achievement results supplementing the interview data (see Bedard et al., 2013a, 2013b; Mombourquette et al., 2013). We extracted the following cross-case findings from the three case studies and compared them in a draft document with the cross-case findings of three Ontario school district leadership practices, a document we shared with Leithwood and which he later cited (Leithwood, 2012). Once we were assured that the research framework was sufficiently robust and valid for both Ontario and Alberta contexts, we decided to write a cross-case analysis of our Alberta findings and to include the literature sources that to us best seem to anchor our findings in a growing but relatively new empirical foundation. We accomplished this task over several months in 2013. A particular focus of our interviews was to get a sense of how district leadership practices had changed, or not changed, over the past five to ten years. All district-level staff (with one exception) had at least five years’ experience in the district and most had ten or more, either in district schools or in central office. All principals interviewed had at least five years of administrative experience in their respective districts. The average tenure of trustees was close to five years. The collective sense of organizational memory was important to us because we wanted to know what impacts, if any, the rise of accountability expectations placed on districts and schools by Alberta Education (Alberta Education, 2012), and by increased trustee and media vigilance, from the mid-1990s onward, had on catalyzing changes in leadership practices at district and school levels. The interviews

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were semi-structured with some close-ended and some open-ended questions to ensure that the data had a degree of consistency in what was asked but also to allow respondents to address other issues in depth that they did not consider adequately posed in the formal questions (Creswell, 2002). The relative length of the district and principal interview protocols, with 27 questions for the former and 16 for the latter, with some sub-questions for both, as well as the need for recalling trends over the last several years, inclined us to share our protocols with respondents in advance so that they would have an opportunity to organize their thoughts. While allowing advanced reading may be viewed as an inducement to rehearsed groupthink (Creswell, 2002), we had to weigh this possibility with the sheer task of sorting out a welter of information requests we were imposing on our respondents. We chose the three districts from a list of 12 possible districts based on the criteria of student results on provincial assessments (Grades 3, 6, 9, and 12) over five or more years and district reputation for leadership as perceived by key stakeholders. The list was developed in consultation with individuals in Alberta Education and CASS. We wrote letters to superintendents explaining our study and asking their consent to interview them and key district staffers who met the criteria of years of service and whose views would be informed on these issues. The district staffers in turn nominated principals and trustees and we chose a number of possible respondents from these lists. Beforehand, we secured approval of the university’s Human Subjects Review, and respondents were asked to read and sign a consent form before the interviews commenced.

LITERATURE REVIEW Setting Direction Schools are in many ways complex organizations, and the educators that inhabit them come from a diversity of backgrounds, experiences, understandings, life histories, and philosophies of education. Within schools, building a shared understanding of a purposeful direction and a set of core goals to support the direction is a challenge that leadership must meet in order to ultimately be successful (Fullan, 2010). Building vision at the school district level is also necessary, while being even more complicated because it involves many more people and also contains schools that function as discreet and sometimes semi-isolated units within the larger whole. Adding to this complexity is the tendency, well described in organization theory, that various models may be dominant from time to time to describe organizational values and behaviors such as formal models, bureaucratic models, or subjective models (Bush, 2011). However, Bush emphasizes that these values and behaviors are not as idiosyncratic and random as some

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would claim, but rather are counter-balanced by the collectivizing impact of socialization undertaken in faculties of education and professional field based development. Establishing and communicating an encompassing vision is integral to many leadership models (Leithwood, 2012). However, vision development can serve either positive or negative purposes, it all depends on how the task is handled (Harris, Muijs, Chapman, Stoll, & Russ, 2003; Silins & Mulford, 2002). A challenge for leadership, of course, is to ensure that positive purposes are actualized when new processes are invoked that involve setting the vision and then communicating it as a key feature in the organization’s drive to improve. Leaders need to recognize that change for change sake is not sufficient for meaningful impact on student learning: “There is a significant gulf between classroom practices that are ‘changed’ and practices that actually lead to greater pupil learning; the potency of leadership for increasing student learning hinges on the specific classroom practices that leaders stimulate, encourage and promote” (Leithwood & Jantzi, 2006, p. 223). Connecting school leadership to student learning is part of a moral imperative referred to by Leithwood and Jantzi (2006) when they note the need of “closing the gap in achievement between students who traditionally do well in schools and those who do not” (p. 41). The transformational leadership model provides one of the links between recognizing the gap in student learning and putting in place a culture that will focus the organization on closing the gap (Leithwood & Jantzi, 1990, 1999, 2000, 2006, 2009). Within the transformational model we see a major emphasis placed on setting directions. Core to the setting-directions mandate is the idea of the leader “helping staff to develop shared understandings about the school and its activities as well as goals that undergird a sense of purpose or vision” (Leithwood & Jantzi, 2009, p. 46). Robinson, Lloyd, and Rowe (2008) explain the connection between goals and practice this way: Goals provide a sense of purpose and priority in an environment where a multitude of tasks can seem equally important and overwhelming. Clear goals focus attention and effort and enable individuals, groups, and organizations to use feedback to regulate their performance. (p. 661)

However, goals and vision are not sufficient by themselves to move the organization forward. Communication is also seen as being key to actualizing the vision and the incumbent goals into everyday practice (Fullan, 2011). Leaders will use vision as a means of coalescing the various goals and purposes of the organization. The communication process will then serve as one of the means through which leadership will refine the vision and work with the various groups to inculcate the vision. Communication processes and structures are used, then, to adapt and refine the vision in relation to concrete implementation.

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In attending more directly to the needs of schools under the rubric of leadership for learning, successful districts in Honig et al.’s study (2010) had morphed from a business and regulatory, management orientation, to that of a leadership orientation to support school-level leadership and to build capacity in the core technology of teaching and learning.

Evidence About Student Learning

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Murphy (2010), Duke (2010), and Leithwood (2009) offer eight broad sources of evidence that should guide district and school leaders in their quest to connect achievement with context: ● ●

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School staffs—are they qualified for the jobs they need to do? Students—to what degree are the basic necessities of life and educational background of the students being met so as to put them into a position of being able to learn? Family conditions—are family and community conditions such that they are in a position to support the school system as educational partners? Curriculum—is the curriculum robust and appropriate enough so as to engage active learners? Instruction—is the instruction provided in the school of a caliber that students will grow from the experience of being in classes? School culture—does it promote learning, collaboration, and continuity between majority and minority groups? Structures and organization—does the structure act as an agent of growth and achievement, or stagnation and under-performance? Leadership—is the environment focused on maximizing student learning or in maintaining the status quo?

Gathering and using appropriate evidence is a responsibility of all members of the school district leadership team (Honig et al., 2010). In Honig et al.’s study of urban schools and districts they noted that before a district could reshape itself into a support system to help all schools improve the quality of teaching and learning, district leaders first had to become actively engaged in the act of working directly with schools, teachers, and students. Five dimensions of central office transformation were noted as being necessary for change to occur. Honig et al. (2010) state: “Each one of the first four dimensions depended on a fifth dimension of transformed central office practice: staff throughout the central office engaging in particular forms of evidence-based decision-making” (p. vii). These dimensions define the new orientation as mediator for professional services between and among schools and the policy-making system (for more on this see the following “Professional Development” section).

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Evidence gathering entails more than looking at state or provincially mandated test results (Knapp, Copland, Honig, Plecki, & Portin, 2010). Such assessments played a role in the data analysis processes used by highperforming systems studied by Honig et al. (2010). However, other sources of data were equally important: environmental scans, student work, surveys, work completion studies, to name a few. It was the actions of leaders at all levels and the ways in which they demonstrated their commitment to the multiple uses of data that made the biggest impact on organizational change strategies. District office staff facilitated the principals’ use of evidence and this promoted the evidence skill base of district staff as well. Principals, in turn, would use the evidence and data pieces provided to them by the central office personnel and use them extensively in their own practices. These systems found that teacher leaders could use the data as a necessary starting point in conversations with teachers to help make learning connections and provide evidence based reasons for suggested change in practice.

Professional Development The role played by professional development in student learning improvement efforts is well researched and comes from a body of literature that is often separated from that of educational leadership (Robinson et al., 2008). It is not the intent of this article to present a review of teacher professional development literature but rather to offer an overview of some of the main ideas connected with the role of leadership in the process. In a study of five specific mediating practices utilized by Instructional Leadership Directors (ILDs) in three urban districts to help principals build their competencies in instructional leadership, Honig (2012) observed the following as most salient (emphasis added): (a) Initiating joint work between ILDs and principals focused on building instructional leadership capacity; (b) differentiating support for some principals consistently over the entire academic year; (c) modeling thinking and action and metacognitive strategies; (d) anchoring the use of tools such as rubrics, worksheets, and self-evaluations in an explicit definition of high-quality instruction; and (e) brokering by bridging principals to instructional and operational supports from the central office and external sources and by managing tensions in buffering. Instructional leadership has had an evolutionary process (Hallinger, 2010): In the 1980s, instructional leadership focused solely on the principal; in the 1990s, there was an increasing focus on the role played by teacher leadership; and in the 2000s, there was explicit reconceptualization of school leadership as a distributed process. Hallinger (2010) defines the current understanding of instructional leadership as “leadership for learning” (p. 72). Leadership for learning incorporates the notion of shared instructional leadership, responds to the needs derived through an understanding of

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local contexts, and incorporates selected features from the transformational leadership model such as modeling, individualized support, and capacity development. Educational leadership meta-analysis reveals some of the significant effects that professional development can have when assessed through the lens of leadership research. Robinson et al. (2008) address the necessity of leadership participation in professional learning centered on changing teaching practices and leading to improved student learning. Principals and school district leaders need to be learners, facilitators, and active participants in the process if change is to actually have a meaningful effect on learning. The ways in which educational leaders apply their leadership practices, rather than the practices themselves, also demonstrate a responsiveness to the context of the organization (Leithwood, Harris, & Hopkins, 2008). This finding is applicable to the ways in which leaders understand and develop people. Simply directing the learning of others is not sufficient for school and school district growth. Leadership needs be seen as a valued resource in the areas of instructional strategies, classroom management, and curriculum design and implementation (Marzano, Waters, & McNulty, 2005). Providing sustained and appropriate professional development where those efforts are aimed at improved teaching and learning (Datnow, Lasky, Stringfield, & Teddie, 2006) makes a difference when applied to a narrowed array of student achievement goals. Furthermore, the practices actually make an impact when they are job-embedded (Seashore Louis, Dretzke, & Wahlstrom, 2010), ongoing and sustained (Horn & Little, 2010), aimed at building capacity related to the goals of the organization, and most effective when carried out in a community of practice (Hord & Hirsch, 2009). Approaches to professional leadership development (those in formal school and district administrative leadership roles such as principals, vice principals, superintendents, and other central office “line” staff) are concerned not only with procedures for identifying, recruiting, selecting, and appraising both school- and district-level leaders but also with the quality of the implementation of the procedures (Leithwood, 2012). Effective leadership refers to that which is instructionally sophisticated and where leaders can demonstrate also attending to the needs of the local context (Honig et al., 2010). The coordinated distribution of leadership across both formal and informal lines within schools and school district is also seen to be an important aspect of what entails professional district leadership practices (Leithwood, Mascall, & Strauss, 2009). Encompassed within these broad parameters of professional district leadership requirements are a number of practices that should be attended to (Leithwood, 2012): transferring principals; assigning most skilled leaders to work in the most needy schools; principals being aware of the instructional quality of teachers; principals being highly skilled in identifying the best teachers for their school; district

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staff clearly focusing on the primacy of student learning; and creating a situation in which leadership is coordinated and widely distributed throughout the organization.

Alignment of Practices and Structures Alignment between state/province, school district, school, and classroom has been shown to be a key ingredient involved in the improvement efforts undertaken in large-system reform (Watterston & Caldwell, 2011). Alignment that is focused on student learning is often defined in terms of:

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Budget and goals—are they considered in the same systematic process? Personnel policies and practices—are they being implemented in tandem with the goals for student learning? Organizational structures—are they paired with staff instructional improvement plans? State/provincial goals for education—are they seen to be actively integrated into district and school plans for education? and Professional development for leaders, teachers, and support staff—are focus and design, sufficient time, and money being allocated? (Leithwood, 2012).

Below, we apply the key points of the literature review on setting direction, evidence based decision-making, professional development, and alignment, to give our findings and the conclusions a more conceptualized foundation. The literature review, we think, offers two salient points of emphasis. One of these points is the relatively recent empirical evidence on district leadership practices, both in Canada and the United States; in other words, this is a relatively new domain that is being explored. Second, we note that the common thrust of the elements of this literature review underscore a growing and powerful understanding of what the precise practices of leadership for learning entails at the district level and their connections to school-level leadership.

FINDINGS Collaboration Between School- and District-Level Leadership in Setting the Direction for Leadership for Learning Across the three Alberta districts, we noted a shift from compliance and control to refocusing on building a shared commitment and capacity to support student achievement, as articulated in a few core goals. Superintendents told us they “buffered” schools (the description used by two superintendents and also by Honig, 2012) from outside initiatives, particularly from Alberta

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Education, that they deemed to be overwhelming in terms of the work agendas of the schools, and that would blur the clear focus on a few core goals (Honig, 2012). Prime example of the mediating role assumed by district leadership in insulating the schools from provincial initiatives that are perceived to detract from a few core district and school goals. The three districts spent considerable time and energy on addressing vision and mission issues with the aim of redefining district and school cultures. Re-visioning was catalyzed by creating productive relationships internally and externally. The process included building a wider net of consultation, paying close attention to trust issues, and ensuring transparency in policy and decision making in a concerted effort we would describe as political leadership (Deal, 2009). As an exercise in cultural leadership (Fullan, 2001), visioning emerged as an important and protracted piece of trust building. The two rural districts mending proverbial fences in the wake of government forced amalgamations provided the spark to initiate this visioning. In the case of the urban district, a 25-year-old vision prompted the re-vitalizing action. Respondents also described a shift from a primary focus on administrative matters and managerialism to instructional leadership, leveraging varying forms of relationships between district staff and groups of principals and teachers depending on the context. Instructional leadership was embedded in district practices through cultural leadership (Fullan, 2001). Over the five-year period of interest to the study, approaches by the three districts to improving curriculum and instruction had changed quite significantly. These changes included greater collaboration across the district for school improvement purposes, greater consistency in priorities and expectations, and significant increases in support by district leaders for improvement work in schools. We note that all three cases shared a noticeable shift in the role of district leadership from functioning as a compliance and control center to emerging as a service center to support leadership for learning (Honig, 2012; Honig et al., 2010). Learning in this new mode refers both to the learning needs of students and the professional learning needs of educators at district and school levels. As Hallinger (2010) reminds us, this is leadership for learning at work, a focus and process that reframes the basic expectations placed on district and school leaders as to core responsibilities (i.e., instructional leadership), is distributive in nature, and cultural in its impact (Fullan, 2002). The trend toward a more collective approach to school improvement also appeared to be unfolding within schools (Leithwood, 2012). Robinson et al. (2008) would characterize this trend as moving from the view that teaching is an enterprise that is inherently semi-private with high job autonomy to a new perspective that emphasizes opening the doors of classrooms to shine a light on teaching and learning, with collegial teams supplementing individualized practice—that teachers and leaders share a joint responsibility

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for student outcomes. In our districts, there had been considerable effort made to break down the isolation in which teachers often found themselves with more collaboration and group efforts around specific teaching and learning goals. This collective effort was more focused on the types of instruction that would be useful to achieve the targets set in the schools’ improvement plans. In this study’s districts, the shift to leadership for learning was characterized by a much more profound presence of district-level instructional leaders, including the superintendents, in the professional work of the schools, leveraging their impacts through clusters of principals and teacher leaders. In addition, Alberta Initiative for School Improvement (AISI) projects proved to be a powerful mechanism to coalesce district and school activities around student learning initiatives2 . Collaboration, intentionality, and goal alignment were key focus areas in district leadership councils with leadership teams composed of district leaders and school principals. Leadership for learning, not minor administrative functions, or an excessive focus on managerialism, dominated the agendas of these councils. These themes were buttressed by the pervasive presence of district leaders in schools to develop conversations and strategies about local teaching and learning issues that often vary widely from school to school, modeling theories of action and thinking in action (Honig, 2012). School plans, informed from the interpretation of an array of data, were developed at the school level after input from local stakeholders, with the expectation that they should also align with district goals. When Alberta Education introduced major curriculum changes over the last several years for social studies, mathematics, information technology, and inclusive education, district-level leaders and district-based AISI coordinators provided the leadership and expertise to build the capacity of principals and teachers to understand, implement, and assess the impact of these changes. All principals were in agreement that the newly refined roles of district leaders and AISI coordinators and the support they have provided directly to schools had a significant impact on enabling school staff members to feel more comfortable with the challenges posed by large-scale curriculum reform. We think it is important to note that all three districts differentiated leadership practices and support for school improvement to fit the context of individual schools. This observation parallels the findings of a recent study of practices in four American districts (Anderson, Mascall, Stiegelbauer, & Park, 2012) as well as those in the Honig (2012) study. Anderson et al. (2012) concluded that the four districts demonstrated variability in district orientation and capacity to understand school needs to improve performance, as well as in district strategies for actually differentiating support to schools. Differentiated assistance can focus both on strengthening implementation of district expectations in order to

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improve school performance, and on supporting experimentation with non-standard solutions to performance challenges that are not solvable through use of established programs and practices. (p. 403)

In our districts, protracted conversations among district and school leaders about very specific issues and results, based on an array of evidence, were critical inputs that facilitated both standardization and differentiation where and when needed.

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Development of a Shared Expertise in the Uses of Evidence About Student Learning In our conversations with district leaders and principals, all eight sources of evidence cited by Murphy (2010), Duke (2010), and Leithwood (2009) were threaded through their responses to various questions. In particular, the large urban district had a very clear sense of just how to tap into these sources in a variety of ways and to develop a district- and school-level narrative that cohesively informed their theory of action at both levels. Principals in the three districts were unanimous in their belief that their districts attached great importance to the use of district-collected evidence to inform decisions across their districts, as well as within schools and classrooms. This evidence was also used to track improvement progress and assist in making instructional decisions for individual students. Principals spoke about the substantial impact such data use had on student, school, and district progress. Dramatic increases in the use of district-collected data to guide improvements were viewed by most interviewees as one of the most important explanations for the achievement gains made by their districts. Superintendents explained that conversations with principals and teachers became much more specific. These changes also included greater use of district collected evidence for decision making and more precise targets for school improvement. Principals and their staffs were expected to explicitly acknowledge and build on district plans as they created their individual school improvement plans. Increasingly, as well, schools were encouraged to focus their improvement efforts on the needs of individual students, not just groups of students. The shift was characterized by a marked increase in knowledge and skills by district and school leaders in the use of data generated by the Accountability Pillar provided to each district by Alberta Education (Alberta Education, 2012). The Accountability Pillar includes data derived through: parent, student, and teacher surveys that deal with safe and caring schools, and student learning opportunities; and student learning achievement (Grades K to 9) from Provincial Achievement Tests (PAT) administered in Grades 3, 6, and 9. Data also encompassed student learning achievement (Grades 10–12) from

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Diploma Exams administered at the end of Grade 12; preparation for lifelong learning, world of work, and citizenship; and information pertaining to parental involvement and continuous improvement. A wider array of evidence also informed the decision-making process, including experience with ongoing AISI projects in schools, student and parent surveys, extensive use of a variety of standardized assessment instruments, and a host of grade- and subject-specific sources of evidence. As one district leader phrased it, “weeding the data garden” was a paramount task for district and school leaders. Typically, in these three Alberta districts, targets and goals for student outcomes were much more sharply focused and fewer in number than in the past. As Honig et al. (2010) found, focusing on student outcomes—school, grade, groups, and individuals—requires a push from the district level and a significant investment of time and resources around capacity building to accomplish this end. Data from a variety of sources informed the three-year education plan, and a lot of effort was expended to ensure that the plan was handcrafted to reflect meaningful consultations and shared commitments within the district. Individual school plans were incorporated into the district three-year plans. Individual school plans reflected the particular needs of each school. At the school level the plans were based on the data about the school in question. District leaders played the lead role in setting the framework and providing support for data gathering, consultation, and in data analysis. One of the rural districts requested preliminary school plans in June of each school year and these plans outlined the school’s goals with respect to Alberta Education and district expectations. These goals had to align with district goals, although sometimes the strategies to implement them differed at the school level. In this district, the specific nature of school goals was directly related to data analysis of Accountability Pillar results, PAT and diploma exam results, principal reviews (every 3 years), school council feedback, district and school plans, and cyclical school reviews of each school (every 6 years). The urban district, in particular, paid heed to data that they collected through public consultation meetings held on a regular basis, on topics generated by the district and by its parent community. The district designated several district staffers to lead these consultations and they received extensive professional development from outside agencies to develop the expertise and skills they needed to make these consultations meaningful, especially with parents and community groups. The data and opinions generated by these consultations have been used to identify complex problems and as the impetus to develop collaborative solutions. The growth in understanding and use of data as a recent trend was particularly identified in the other rural district. The principals noted that they were now expected to use evidence for any new project they wanted to start and that the superintendent was always looking to ensure that they

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were following up with the data tracking that they said they were going to do. Data, however, were not being collected and used just for the sake of using them. Educators in this district were expected to use data to ensure that growth was happening. As one principal said, “If we don’t count it how do we know we are improving?” Educators were expected to use the results from the Accountability Pillar report but also were expected to develop their own measures where appropriate and applicable. This district invited an Alberta Education staffer with particular expertise in student outcome data analysis to build district and principal capacity in this area and to ameliorate what several respondents noted had been a less than core priority in previous years in the district. Also mentioned as valuable sources of data, for example, were several exit surveys of students and demographic information about students related to their chances of success. Valuable, too, were instruments such as the Tell Them From Me surveys that probed students’ perceptions of school culture and climate and how well the school was attending to their needs. Results of these measures did not always concur and educators were encouraged to work at understanding the reasons for differences in results and to attend to them. Respondents claimed that there had been considerable growth over the previous five years in their understanding and uses of data to inform decisions. While five years earlier considerable amounts and types of data were being collected, many school leaders and teachers were not sure how to use them effectively. Hence, over recent years, capacity building in how “to weed the data garden” was a sustained focus in all three districts.

Provision of Professional Development That Is Job-Embedded and Based on School Needs Extensive professional development was provided for teachers and school leaders in the three districts. This included a wide variety of opportunities both in and out of school, but with the greatest proportion of PD resources devoted to school-embedded opportunities (Seashore Louis, Leithwood, Wahlstrom, & Anderson, 2010b), usually provided in some form of learning community. Particularly helpful was the direct partnering with principal and teachers in schools by area superintendents in the urban district and district staffers in the rural districts around two main areas: problem identification and solving, and curriculum innovation. These sessions could look like learning coaches working directly with small groups of teachers, realignment of staff meetings to become professional development opportunities geared to changing teaching practice, and/or principals and superintendents viewing classroom instruction together so as to calibrate their understanding to teaching strategies now being used. Principals frequently mentioned the revised

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district leadership councils as excellent vehicles to share common concerns and to problem solve, elbow to elbow with district staff. Expectations for instructional leadership by principals also increased quite substantially across the three districts. Principals were expected to have close knowledge of instruction in their schools’ classrooms and considerable influence on its direction. Capacities for such leadership were developed with considerable district support (Leithwood, 2012). When curriculum change was on the agenda, the districts embedded additional staff with particular expertise to guide teachers through the process. The needs of students within the schools were perceived as the driving force in the crafting of district and school goals. Evidence from principal and district-leader interviews described three shifts that occurred over roughly a half dozen years in the content and delivery of professional development (PD) within the districts (Leithwood, 2012). The content shift was from some combination of centrally determined and/or individual preference-based PD to the very close alignment of PD with the capacities needed to achieve district and school priorities. Identification of the capacities to be developed typically arose from examinations of evidence about what was working and not working, with PD initiatives aimed at remediating what was not working. The delivery shift was from the provision of PD, particularly for teachers, primarily in locations outside of schools, to a much larger proportion of PD being job-embedded. This was undertaken in school or school-like contexts where newly acquired capacities had to be implemented if PD was to make much difference. Schools’ professional learning communities were frequently cited as key locations for teacher PD and school coordinators were expected to be important PD resources for each school. District-based AISI coordinators and school-based AISI-lead teachers often worked with teachers in schools to improve classroom practice. A third shift occurred in the use of teacher professional growth plans. At one time, the plans reflected the individual goals and objectives of the teachers concerned. In the last five or so years, the plans have taken on a more focused linkage to school goals and district priorities. Increasingly, the approval of individual growth initiatives and commensurate funding is more closely coupled with their alignment to school priorities, not individual preferences. For school leaders, in the last five years, professional development activities in the three districts have often been framed to reflect the seven dimensions of the Professional Practice Competencies for School Leaders in Alberta (Alberta Education, 2011), a policy document that is still not part of the provincial regulatory framework after nine years in the making. While the three districts valued the Competencies framework as an instrument to identify potential leaders, to prepare them for future or current roles, and to

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assess leader efficacy, we note that this practice is by no means a uniform practice in Alberta (Mombourquette, 2013). As this description makes clear, the districts approached professional development as a key function of their improvement efforts and crafted forms of professional development for both teachers and administrators consistent with the best available evidence about effective professional development. PD was an integral part of both school and district improvement problem-solving processes and the close monitoring of progress toward improvement goals by the district created an indirect but powerful means of holding staff accountable for actually applying the capacities acquired through PD (Leithwood, 2012). Over the last several years, principals told us, district leadership was perceived as a valued resource to enhance capacity building on several fronts, including instructional strategies and curriculum design and implementation, as described in Marzano et al. (2005). Central office leaders in the districts were asked to describe what the district looked for in their prospective leaders, as well as the district’s approaches to recruiting, selecting, preparing, and appraising both districtand school-level leaders. These interviewees were also asked how these approaches had changed over the past five years. Significant similarities, as well as differences, were evident among the districts. The urban district devoted much effort to ensure that the particular knowledge and skill sets of their principals matched the contexts of the schools in which they were placed. The two rural districts were constrained in this regard because of low numbers of potential candidates internally, the difficulty in attracting outside candidates, and budgetary realities. The qualities the three districts were seeking in their school-level leaders and prospective leaders included: the ability to communicate the district’s vision, the ability to help craft the directions for improvement work, and a capacity and disposition for helping others with this work. Both school and district leaders, respondents indicated, needed to be exemplary teachers able to model good instruction to others. Many of these qualities, respondents noted, were included in the Professional Practice Competencies for School Leaders in Alberta. At the district level, leaders in particular needed to be adaptable and flexible, maintaining multiple priorities at the same time, and able to collaborate productively with others. Interviewees said that these leaders also needed to have broad experience, refined relationship skills, and the ability to add value to the conversations and decisions of the senior leadership team. We heard that all three districts had moved away from the “tapping on the shoulder” model for leader recruitment. Instead, they have opted for a more invitational style to identify potential leaders particularly from within the districts. In two of the districts, interested parties are required to engage

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in the equivalent of a leadership academy over an extended period of time and demonstrate their ability to handle leadership tasks. In the urban district, leadership hopefuls enter a number of pools to provide potential candidates for varying levels of formal leadership. Much care is taken to match the knowledge, skills, and dispositions of a particular candidate to the contextual needs of the school in question. In the two rural districts succession is a critical issue because it is difficult to find a substantial number of possible candidates for formal leadership from outside the district and, therefore, they have to “grow their own.” In all three districts, school leaders are assessed using the criteria derived from the Professional Practice Competencies for School Leaders in Alberta guideline and from locally appropriate criteria, an example of what Honig (2012) would describe as anchoring practice through the use of tools and rubrics. To address in-house needs for leadership preparation and succession, the urban district embarked upon the development of a Leadership Academy. The 10 modules, written or to be written by principals, vice principals, and superintendents, were standards-based. Revisions were made to each module after senior leadership had input about their effectiveness and after recommendations were made to the District Leadership Council. Each module was piloted with principals first, then revised, and then used within the vice-principals’ council and the assistant principals’ council. Because participants varied in experience and skill, they were likely to exhibit less than “exemplary” competence in one or more modules. Specific supports were in place for individuals by district leadership in order to help them bridge any perceived gaps. In December 2010, Visionary Leadership was piloted as a module in the District Leadership Council, and though well received, revisions to it were made based on the feedback from participants. Participation in the Leadership Academy was an expectation of the urban district’s Professional Profile, Performance Appraisal, and Growth Plan.

Alignment of an Array of Practices and Structures to Support Student Learning Allocation of resources was impressively aligned with the districts’ focus on improving instruction and student achievement. Almost all principals in the three districts believed that their districts provided them with as much support as they requested. In almost all cases, principals’ requests for additional resources and support were met when shown to be in alignment with district priorities. These districts also aligned their personnel resources around their main priorities as, for example, the assignment of learning coaches and/or AISI lead teachers to all schools to build instructional capacities. The principals’ consensus was that the districts did their best to provide reasonable budgets. Typically, central office staff and principals met to go through the district budget and budgets are allotted to schools, with some

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leeway given to schools to allocate resources in ways that suited their particular contexts. On alignment of personnel policies and procedures to support curriculum and instruction (C & I) priorities, principals most frequently mentioned the support they received on the C & I front from the district through the AISI coordinators, specialists, and provincial professional development organizations. In two of our largely rural districts, getting qualified people for specialized teaching positions is often difficult and budget constraints meant that sometimes, despite the need, some positions remained unfilled. Instruction in some subjects where specialists are “few and far between” were remediated by technology hook-ups for C & I. In the two rural districts several principals described the overall structure as being more “flat” than “hierarchical,” with more informal and personal means of communication favored over more formal means. In this “flat” orientation, despite the significant geographical hurdles, two levels of leadership streams frequently merged. In terms of Leithwood’s (2012) criteria of alignment, the urban district most closely fit this profile, while the two rural districts acknowledged the criteria and met them when possible but they also had to confront constraints by invoking a practice that Weick (2001) termed bricolage, using “whatever resources and repertoire one has to perform whatever task one faces” (p. 62). While we think that Weick’s (2001) notion of bricolage has some validity regarding ad hoc adjustments in rural practices, our evidence about the degree and consistency of alignment practices in the three districts seriously calls into question his long-standing description of educational organizations as loosely coupled systems (Weick, 1976). The notion of loose-coupledness rests on two principles: (a) school systems typically have multiple levels of action that may or may not connect with one another and where buffering outside influences is commonplace; and (b) the relationship between the means (the teaching process) to ends (student outcomes) is either unclear or sufficiently complex and particularized to contexts as to elude tight coupling throughout the system. However, more than two decades after Weick’s initial formulation, Elmore (2000) made a powerful argument that the viability of the concept of loose coupledness is no longer politically or professionally sustainable, in an era of standards-based accountability, and of information technology and data use that is available to all levels of the system. Elmore (2000) also provided numerous examples of where district and school leadership practices could be described as moving away from the loosely coupled paradigm, many of which are recognizable in the practices described in our study. In our three districts, district leadership practices around the intersection of instructional leadership, evidence gathering and use, and the alignment of policies, structures, procedures, and budgets, suggest to us that the logic of loose coupledness is being undermined by a more systemic embrace of tight coupledness. Of the three districts, the urban

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was the most explicitly tightly coupled. On the topic of whether the core technology of education is highly uncertain and unspecifiable, Hattie (2012) expresses a strong contrarian viewpoint. Evidence from all three districts would suggest that C & I initiatives did not start with the premise that the teaching and learning process is uncertain and unspecifiable.

CONCLUSION

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We close with eight commonalities in district leadership practices that the cross-cases share and two differences between the rural and urban districts: 1. A shift from compliance and control to refocusing on building a shared commitment and capacity to support student achievement, as articulated in a few core goals (Honig, 2012; Honig et al., 2010; Robinson et al., 2008). The three districts spent considerable time and energy on addressing vision and mission issues with the aim of redefining district and school cultures (Fullan, 2009; Leithwood, 2012; Seashore Louis, Leithwood, et al., 2010b). 2. A shift from a primary focus on administrative matters and managerialism to instructional leadership, leveraging varying forms of relationships between district staff and groups of principals and teachers depending on the context. Instructional leadership was embedded in district practices through cultural leadership (Fullan, 2011; Hallinger, 2010; Honig, 2012; Sharrat & Fullan, 2009). 3. A shift from loosely coupled relationships between key elements in the district to a more tightly coupled alignment regarding goals, focus, and denser networks of professional work (Elmore, 2000; Leithwood, 2012). 4. A shift from traditional decision-making models to enhancing a richer flow of ideas and views between district- and school-level leaders and between district staff and teacher leaders, making boundaries more permeable (Honig, 2012; Leithwood, 2012). 5. A shift from narrow data gathering to building a widely shared capacity to use an array of evidence to inform the alignment of policy, procedures, structures, programming, and instruction (Duke, 2010; Leithwood, 2010; Murphy, 2010). 6. A shift from the tapping-on-the-shoulder model of leadership succession to a focused and standards-based in-house capacity to support the selection, development, and assessment of incumbent and potential school and district leaders (Honig, 2012; Honig et al., 2010).

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7. A shift from outside-in professional development to an inside-out, jobembedded model in which leadership plays a role in design and implementation (Robinson et al., 2008; Seashore Louis, Leithwood, Wahlstrom, & Anderson, 2010a). 8. A shift from passive engagement of stakeholders to creating productive relationships, building a wider net of consultation, paying close attention to trust issues, and ensuring transparency in policy and decision making. An exercise in political leadership (Deal, 2009; Honig et al., 2010; Knapp et al., 2010; Leithwood, 2012). In terms of urban-rural differences, we recognized that principals in the urban district valued the tightly centralized services that the district provided them, while their rural colleagues appreciated a more decentralized approach that suited their geographical isolation. Further, we appreciated that challenges in political and cultural leadership, in connecting with parents, communities, and agencies, required different strategies based on the urban-rural dimension. To summarize, what these shifts illustrate, to extrapolate on the notion of Fullan (2002) about the connectedness of leadership for learning and cultural leadership, is that district practices to sustain student learning in our three districts induced a fundamental change in the craft of those practices, in the professional values leaders espoused, and in the organizational cultures in which they worked. Significantly, Honig (2012) found a similar reorientation in three highperforming districts in the United States, while Leithwood (2012) indicated comparable evidence of practice in three Ontario cases. What our study and Honig’s study affirm is a commonality of core district practices to sustain student learning in districts that may be described as high performing or rapidly improving. This is new to our understanding of the core roles that districts play in education policy and governance, that is a shift from a business and regulatory orientation to that of being a service center for staff and student learning. We must also acknowledge, at the same time, that the evidence of Honig and our own study suggests that, while this new orientation may be a growing trend in district leadership practices, we at the same time must acknowledge that these practices are by no means universal.

NOTES 1. Many of these practices are central to CASS’s leadership dimensions framework and bear similar, but not identical, characteristics to those used in Ontario’s Leadership Framework (Leithwood, 2012), the latter developed under the auspices of the Leadership Development Branch of Ontario’s Ministry of Education. Dr. Leithwood’s input in the framing of both these documents was extensive. We made slight adjustments to the interview protocol developed by Leithwood to fit the Alberta context but our aim was to follow that protocol as closely as possible in order to allow for comparison with the three Ontario cases studied by Leithwood.

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2. For over a decade the Alberta Initiative for School Improvement provided substantial funding to local districts and participating schools to support locally-defined and managed school improvement projects.

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