2012 UCEA Convention

Teacher Supports and District Attrition: The Impact of Instructional Leadership. Brooks A. Rosenquist, Vanderbilt University; Erin Henrick, Vanderbilt University; Charlotte Jean Munoz, Vanderbilt University
This paper discusses teachers; attrition from a school district through the lens of lost investment in human capital, stymieing efforts of improvement at scale. This analysis finds a surprising relationship between principal’s level of instruction leadership and teacher attrition from the district, which seems to affect teachers differently depending on years of teaching experience. Importantly, the principal’s level of instructional leadership seems to attenuate the well-known relationships between teacher experience and attrition.

The Impact of Principal Leadership on the Development of Teachers’ Collective Efficacy Beliefs.
Letitia Williams, University of Maryland, College Park
This qualitative study explored the principal leadership behaviors that influence the development of teachers’ collective efficacy (CE) beliefs. The study found that by establishing and clarifying goals for student learning and interpreting past performance; by creating and guarding spaces for collaborative learning; and, by serving as a buffer between the environment and the school the principal was central to teachers’ perception of CE sources and so influenced teachers CE beliefs.

The Influence of Typologies of School Leaders on Teacher Retention: A Multilevel Latent Class Analysis. Angela Urick, Minnesota State University, Mankato; Alex J Bowers, Teachers College, Columbia University
This study uses a multilevel latent class analysis to examine the 1999-2000 Schools and Staffing Survey to identify a) the different types of teachers and principals in school leadership when accounting for the interaction between their perceptions, b) the distribution of teacher types across principal types, and c) the extent that a teacher type with a principal type predicts teacher retention. We found specific combinations of principal and teacher types that predicted teacher retention.