A More Productive Approach to Assessing School Leadership

Strong school leadership is essential to creating the conditions for effective teaching and learning. But understanding how well leadership is working across a school can be difficult.

Traditional leadership evaluations often focus on the performance of an individual principal. While those evaluations serve an important purpose, they may not provide a complete picture of how leadership actually happens throughout a school.

A broader approach is to assess leadership practices: the day-to-day actions, routines, and systems that support teaching, learning, collaboration, and school improvement.

Look Beyond the Principal

Leadership in schools is rarely the work of one person. Principals, assistant principals, instructional coaches, teacher leaders, teams, and other staff members all contribute to how a school operates.

For that reason, assessing school leadership can mean looking beyond individual leaders and asking questions such as:

• Are teachers given meaningful opportunities to collaborate?
• Is professional learning connected to instructional needs?
• How effectively does the school use data to improve teaching and learning?
• Do educators receive useful feedback about their practice?
• Are responsibilities and expectations clear across the school?
• Do staff members have opportunities to participate in important decisions?

Questions like these shift the focus from “How effective is our principal?” to “How effectively are important leadership practices happening in our school?”

That distinction can lead to very different information.

Gather Perspectives Across the School

School leaders have one view of how leadership practices are working. Teachers and other staff members may have another.

Both perspectives matter.

A school-wide assessment can help identify where perceptions align and where they differ. For example, leaders may believe that teachers have meaningful opportunities to collaborate, while teachers may report that scheduled collaboration time is rarely focused on instruction.

Neither perspective alone tells the whole story. Looking at patterns across groups can provide a more useful starting point for discussion and improvement.

Focus on Practices That Schools Can Change

Useful leadership data should help a school determine what to do next.

Broad measures of satisfaction or school climate can provide valuable information about how people experience their workplace. Assessing specific leadership practices adds another layer by helping schools identify the routines, structures, and behaviors that may be contributing to those experiences.

Instead of learning only that communication is an area of concern, for example, a school might discover that staff members need more consistent opportunities to participate in decisions or clearer communication about instructional priorities.

The more specific the information, the easier it becomes to identify a potential course of action.

Consider a Research-Based Leadership Assessment

Schools do not have to develop this kind of assessment on their own. Research-based instruments are available that are specifically designed to examine leadership practices.

One example is the Comprehensive Assessment of Leadership for Learning (CALL), which was developed through research at the University of Wisconsin–Madison with support from the U.S. Department of Education's Institute of Education Sciences.

CALL takes a formative, school-wide approach to leadership assessment. Rather than evaluating an individual leader, it gathers input from educators about specific leadership practices across the school. Results are intended to help schools identify strengths, areas for growth, and possible next steps.

This approach reflects a broader idea behind leadership assessment: the goal is not simply to assign a rating. It is to generate information that people can use.

Turn Assessment Into Conversation and Action

No survey or assessment can provide a complete picture of leadership in a school. The real value comes from what happens after the results are available.

Schools can use school-wide practice-based data to ask:

Where are our strongest practices? Where do staff members see things differently? Which findings surprise us? What is within our control to change? What should we prioritize?

Those conversations can connect assessment results to existing improvement plans, professional learning, leadership-team priorities, and other sources of school data.

Ultimately, assessing leadership practices is most useful when it does more than describe the current situation. It gives educators a clearer understanding of how leadership is experienced across the school and provides a starting point for making it stronger.