Chapter 8: School-Based Instructional Leadership In Demanding Environments: New Challenges, New Practices

Instructional leadership has long been recognized and widely advocated as a central facet of school administrators’ roles (e.g., Glickman, 2002; Hallinger, 2005; Leithwood & Duke, 1999; Smith & Andrews, 1989). The literature on school-based instructional leadership to date has tended to focus on school principals, detailing ways that people occupying this position exert direct and indirect influence on teaching and learning in the school (Reitzug & West, 2011), while also noting how easily the function gets crowded out of the principal’s daily work by burgeoning management responsibilities (Portin, DeArmond, Gundlach, & Schneider, 2003). A parallel strand of research has brought recent scholarly attention to another position, that of the school-based instructional coach or teacher leader (e.g., Mraz, Algozzine, & Watson, 2008; Taylor, 2008).