For Instructional Leadership Directors:
Planning and Negotiating a Focus for Your Instructional Leadership Work with Individual
Principals
The core task of Instructional Leadership Directors (ILDs) in working with principals is to help them
improve their instructional leadership, both individually and in groups. This tool is intended to help you
answer the question, “In my one-to-one work with an individual principal, what areas of his or her
practice should we be focusing on next?”
Within in the context of the district’s instructional leadership framework (if one has been adopted and
agreed to) and the district’s instructional priorities, you will have your own observations about each
principal’s individual instructional leadership strengths and weaknesses. Your principal also will have
her (or his) own sense of where she wants and needs to improve her practice, and may have already set
specific goals for her work through other processes.
Ultimately you can negotiate a focus for your work by looking together, as ILD and principal, at what you
know about the school’s student work, teacher practice, and the principal’s own practice and what that
tells you about where that principal most needs to focus. Before you sit down with your principal,
though, it can be useful to clarify your own thoughts about the most important areas of focus, as
suggested by the prompts below. This tool then helps you prepare for and debrief the actual
conversation with the principal.
1. Determine Claims. Start by reviewing your data/evidence sources to develop or strengthen your
claims about your principal’s instructional leadership practice.
What claims can you make about this principal’s
instructional leadership work? (A claim is an evidencebased statement.)
What evidence supports your claim?
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2. Choose the claims you think are highest priority. Sometimes we generate many claims about our
principals’ work, but cannot productively take action on all of them. Based on principal, teacher and
student performance data, which claims, in your view, are most important to address first?
Of all your claims about this principal’s instructional
leadership, which one or two do you think the two of
you should address first/next?
How will working on this area of practice make a
difference in principal, teacher and student
performance?
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3. Prepare for a focus-planning conversation with your principal:
A. How will you use your evidence of principal and student and teacher performance to engage this
principal in a conversation about the focus of your work together on your one-to-one visits?
B. Given this principal’s skill set, experience, and disposition as a learner, what stance(s) will you take in
the conversation? (E.g., will you attempt to be more or less motivational, directive, collegial, etc., in
your interaction with him or her?) Why is that stance the right approach?
4. After the conversation with your principal:
A. What did you agree on as an appropriate focus for your work together?
B. As you reflect on the conversation, do you think this focus will be powerful enough to actually
generate improvements in principal, teacher, and student performance?
C. What went well for you as the ILD in the conversation? Which of your moves were most effective?
What would you do differently next time?
D. What did you learn about your principal? About yourself in connection with him or her?
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E. What are your next steps in actually doing the work with your principal on the area(s) agreed to in
your conversation? (NOTE: In lieu of answering this question here you can instead use the next tool in
this toolkit, “Principal Instructional Leadership: Developing a Learning Plan,” to develop the next steps
jointly with your principal.)
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