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- In this white paper, The Untapped Potential of the Principal Supervisor: How Support for School Leaders Should Change (2021) the National Institute for Excellence in Teaching outlines four high-impact strategies to maximize support for school leaders.In this book, Supervising Principals for Instructional Leadership: A Teaching and Learning Approach (2020) the authors, Honig & Rainey, argue for a shift in supervisors’ focus from a compliance and evaluation to serving as learning partners for principals. They also recommend shifting group meetings for principals from delivery of information to intensive coaching differentiated to meet principals’ needs. Appendices include a Professional Growth Planning (PGP) Process for Principal Supervisors, 360 Survey Questions, and Principal Supervisor Performance Standards.The George W. Bush Institute created this Principal Learning and Supervision Guidebook (2019) for district leaders. It outlines strategies for improving professional learning experiences for principals and best-practices for supervising principals. The guidebook includes detailed examples and artifacts.Vanderbilt and Mathematica published a Principal Survey and a Principal Supervisor Survey to gather perspectives from principals and supervisors on implementation of the Principal Supervisor Initiative and its effects on principals.New Leaders created the Principal Supervisor Network Design Toolkit (2016) to guide the design of networks supported by individual principal supervisors so they can be effective in supporting the portfolio of schools they lead.The District Leadership Design Lab report, From Procedures To Partnership: Redesigning Principal Supervision To Help Principals Lead For High-Quality Teaching And Learning (2015) identifies nine trends in how 11 school systems applied lessons from emerging research and practice to transform their principal supervisor positions.
This Wallace Foundation-commissioned report, A New Role Emerges for Principal Supervisors: Evidence from Six Districts in the Principal Supervisor Initiative (2018) from Vanderbilt and Mathematica finds principals and districts benefit when principal supervisors move beyond the role of administrator to coach and mentor. This study of the implementation of the first three years of the Principal Supervisor Initiative suggests the work is possible, concluding that the six districts “demonstrated the feasibility of making substantial changes to the principal supervisor role” across five areas: redefining the job, reducing the average number of principals supervisors oversee, training supervisors for their responsibilities, developing systems to identify and train aspiring supervisors, and modifying the central office to buttress the new role.
This in-depth case study from Education Research and Development, Shifting District Culture to Better Support Schools: The Cleveland Principal Supervisor Initiative (2018), details three strategies Cleveland used to shift central office mindsets toward supporting schools and the students they serve: 1) redefining the principal supervisor role; 2) creating networks of support; and 3) designing and delivering an aspiring principal supervisor program. The report describes lessons learned from this work and recommendations for other districts attempting similar changes.
This New Leaders report, Focusing Principal Supervision on Instruction (2016), describes how Broward County and Des Moines have substantially reduced principal supervisors’ span of control and focused their role on supporting principals. It describes how other non instructional leadership responsibilities get handled when the supervisor role is more focused on instructional leadership.
This report and video from the Wallace Foundation, The Power of Principal Supervisors: How Two Districts are Remaking an Old Role (2016) profile efforts in two districts–Tulsa and Washington DC–that have reshaped the job of the principal supervisor to focus on supporting principals.
This Wallace Foundation-commissioned research report from Vanderbilt and Mathematica, Changing the Principal Supervisor Role to Better Support Principals: Evidence from the Principal Supervisor Initiative (2020) finds that districts and supervisors made substantial changes as a result of the Principal Supervisor Initiative, but teachers’ perceptions of principals’ performance remained largely the same.
This report from the Council of the Great City Schools, Trends in Principal Supervisor Leadership and Support (2020), outlines findings from two surveys, fielded six years apart, that provide indications that large school districts nationwide are redesigning the principal supervisor job to focus more on principal support.
This Wallace Foundation-funded report from Vanderbilt, University of Utah and Mathematica, Leading the Change: A Comparison of the Principal Supervisor Role in Principal Supervisor Initiative Districts and Other Urban Districts (2020), finds that districts involved in the Wallace initiative had more supports to buttress the reconceived job than other districts.
This RAND report, Support for Instructional Leadership: Supervision, Mentoring, and Professional Development for U.S. School Leaders: Findings from the American School Leader Panel (2016), presents findings from a Wallace Foundation-funded survey of RAND’s American School Leader Panel, a nationally representative sample of principals, regarding the quantity, content, and perceived quality of on-the-job support offered to them by their school districts.
This New Teacher Center report is a reissue of School Leadership Network’s Churn: The High Cost of Principal Turnover (2018). It calls upon decision-makers and funders to value and prioritize principal retention efforts in part by restructuring principal supervisor roles.

School Leadership Support

Evolution of the Principalship: Leaders Explain How the Profession Is Changing Through a Most Difficult Year

Aligned Standards Advance Leaders, Teachers, And Students Together: By Jackie Wilson

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