The Leadership Framework is a survey tool that collects teacher perceptions of the behaviors and characteristics of a principal leading a digital learning initiative. It is a tool that can help in the process of identifying areas for leadership improvement and professional development.

Instructions for Use

If you decide that you have a question that might be addressed with data describing the strengths of and challenges faced by the school principal in technology innovation initiatives, consider using the Leadership Framework. This instrument allows you to identify areas for improvement and professional development. The following checklist is provided to help you plan and implement your Leadership Framework in a way that will maximize its value, in terms of informing school-level planning for technology use.

Planning for Leadership Framework Use

• Convene whatever team is responsible for evaluation and/or technology planning in
  your school
• Clarify and come to consensus on the questions about which your school cares.
• Review the Leadership Framework instrument and supporting documentation.
• Determine if Leadership Framework data will be useful in answering those questions.
• Determine who will be your school-based “Leadership Framework manager”; the person responsible for managing your Leadership Framework implementation.
• Develop a way to keep track of who has—and has not—completed your Leadership Framework.
• Determine how and when respondents will complete your Leadership Framework.
• Communicate in advance with staff members about the purpose of the Leadership Framework, how it fits into school technology or evaluation planning, and how important it is that everyone completes the instrument. Be sure that everyone understands that it is impossible to identify individual respondents among the Leadership Framework data; that data are reported only at the school level; and that Leadership Framework data will not be used to assign awards or sanctions to individual staff members or schools.
• Define a plan for disseminating Leadership Framework findings to the entire school.

Managing Leadership Framework Responses

• When your Leadership Framework opens, implement the plan your school
  developed to assure a sufficiently high rate of response.
• Using the tracking system developed during the planning phase, follow up
  with any slow respondents, guiding them through the process if necessary.
• Note that it is possible for a respondent to submit more than one set of answers. This is generally not an issue, since few really care to complete the instrument more than once, but it should be kept in mind as a possible source of error.

Using Your Leadership Framework Data

• Convene the evaluation or technology planning team.
• Share the Leadership Framework report among planning team members, either by
  electronic means or by distribution of hard copies of the report page.
• Make appropriate inferences from your Leadership Framework data. It is critical to revisit the questions being asked at this point. The Leadership Framework provides a lot of data and it may be possible to be distracted by issues other than those seen as important during the planning process.
• Examine your Leadership Framework findings for surprises or unanticipated findings.
• Importantly, revisit and refine the questions that Leadership Framework data were expected to answer. It is not at all unusual to discover that a primary finding arising from Leadership Framework data is that more data is required to really understand issues at hand.
• Consider next steps in the evaluation process. It may be necessary for example to convene groups to discuss why staff members may have responded to Leadership Framework like they did, or the planning team might examine possible changes to program implementation based on findings.
• Share your Leadership Framework findings with the entire school staff. By doing so, buy-in will be encouraged, increasing the entire staff’s involvement in the evaluation process and raising the likelihood of future participation in data collection activities.

Teams

Program Evaluation and Education Research (PEER) Group

Published

June 24, 2015

Resource Type

Survey Instrument

Published By

Friday Institute for Educational Innovation