After the take-over of the Orleans parish-wide school system following the devastation created by Hurricane Katrina in 2005, the re-creation of the Orleans Parish Schools created the first all-charter, decentralized school system in the United States. Currently, the Orleans Parish Schools are settled and posed to face the challenges of any other urban emergent school district. Authors employed a single case study approach and activity theory as a framework to investigate three research questions: (1) What are the perceptions of principals and individuals that lead charter management organizations (CMOs) in an all charter district regarding writing pedagogy? (2) How do principals/chiefs support instructional coaches regarding writing pedagogy? (3) How do principals/chiefs support classroom teachers regarding writing pedagogy? Results revealed that principals and school chiefs relied on commercial curriculum as sufficient in terms of increasing capacity to teach writing and for PK-12 students to experience authentic writing pedagogy.
TopSituating Literacy Leadership And Instructional Leadership
The complex nature of the principalship highlights conventional roles and demands, including facilitating the school mission, vision and goals, organization management, supervision of faculty and staff, evaluation, and collaborating with teachers, students, families, and communities. The aforementioned aspects of principal leadership have traditionally intersected to support student learning (Hallinger & Snidvongs, 2008). For several decades, the position of the principal as an instructional leader has been a historically accepted and well-documented leadership paradigm in schooling in the U.S. (Donnmoyer & Wagstaff, 1990; Hallinger, 2003; Leithwood et al., 2004; Murphy, 1988; Robinson et al., 2008).
Considering the importance of literacy, specifically learning to write in students’ overall academic achievement (Graham et al., 2020; Graves, 2004; Hoewing & Sulentic Dowell, 2010; Lau et al., 2019; Protheroe, 2012), a significant subset of instructional leadership is the principal’s knowledge and ability to support student literacy development in writing and promote teachers’ capacity to teach writing in both traditional and charter settings. However, as a subset of instructional leadership, literacy leadership has not been a primary focus of research in charter schools or principal leadership development. Similarly, research that examines the principal encouragement of writing practices has not been investigated widely within the literacy field in charter settings. The paucity of research that examines how charter leaders enact literacy leadership in writing led us to this timely study, situated in an all-charter district. We define literacy leadership as school leaders who are knowledgeable of literacy content knowledge and processes, work to develop shared decision-making processes that emphasize student literacy development and provide structures and systems that support the development of staff literacy instructional practices (Bean, 2020; Bean & Dagen, 2011; Brumley, 2010; Gabriel, 2020; Matsumura, et al., 2009; Murphy, 2004, Sulentic Dowell et al., 2012).