Beyond the Policy Memo: Designing to Strengthen the Practice of District Central Office Leadership for Instructional Improvement at Scale
Authors: Honig Meredith I. 
Published: November 2021

This chapter argues for the importance of design-based leadership research (DBLR) for advancing the research and practice of educational leadership, with a focus on school district central offices. DBLR, like other design-based research, calls on researchers to develop designs for practice. Unlike other such research in education that calls for designs for classrooms, DBLR focuses on designs for leaders. Researchers working in this mode develop designs for leadership practice that reflect the latest knowledge about how leaders matter for improved student results; they work alongside leaders to use that knowledge to design and engage in new forms of their own practice consistent with the knowledge and appropriate to their settings. Participants study the process to feed new knowledge into the partnership sites and the field. This chapter elaborates how such research differs from traditional scholarship on district central offices and forms of action research. Challenges to conducting DBLR include focusing practitioners on central offices (especially in tough budget times), capturing central office practice in DBLR knowledge-building activities, and growing and sustaining the work. Early experience illuminates how to address those challenges and advance DBLR partnerships that promise to significantly strengthen leadership practice in support of improved results for all students.

In school districts across the country, central office staff members are working to improve how they lead district-wide instructional improvement, but are finding few guides or supports for that work, what design researchers might call limited “designs” for their leadership. Consider the following example.

In a Midwestern school district, the superintendent promoted a successful principal, Betty Greene, to a new high-level position, reporting directly to the superintendent's office. In that position, she and two colleagues are to help all district principals become better instructional leaders—principals who do not mainly manage their buildings, but work intensively with teachers to improve the quality of classroom instruction. Greene's new position represents a sea change for many school district central offices from their historical focus on business and regulatory functions to providing direct, intensive supports to schools to improve the quality of instruction across the district. Greene enthusiastically accepted the position. She believed she had expert knowledge of high-quality teaching and how principals could support it. She viewed the new post as an opportunity to take some of her own successful school-level leadership to scale across the district. However, once in her new post, she struggled. With no predecessor to consult with, she wondered, “I know my charge is to help principals become stronger instructional leaders, but what does that mean I actually do day-to-day to realize those results?” As a school principal, she had access to myriad professional development opportunities, such as workshops sponsored by the state, the district, and outside groups, as well as conferences and peer networking opportunities. While not all of those opportunities were high quality, Greene always took something away from them. But in the central office, she found professional development opportunities for staff virtually nonexistent. Three years into the post, she reflected, “I have been in a building for 30 years and building principal for 20. When I was principal, I regularly complained that central office staff were never in my building. I have been at this job for three years, but I am hardly ever in buildings myself. I don't know what to do when I'm there to help.”