Observation Methods: Learning about Leadership Practice through Shadowing

It is known that the role of principals is crucially important to school success. It is also known that their work is very demanding and stressful. Can anything be learned about principalship from studying how school leaders spend their time or from observing them at work? Research studies based on observation of principals as well as diaries and logs completed by school leaders themselves generally show a relentless, complex and emotionally demanding workload consisting of a variety of tasks characterized by volume, pace, brevity and fragmentation. This paper considers different methodological approaches to studying school leaders at work. After consideration of a number of relevant studies, it draws upon data derived from a recently completed small-scale study of new heads in large English cities (Earley et al., 2011) to analyse how leaders spend their time at school. Observation schedules, guides and checklists identify the many different activities that school leaders undertake, usually falling within such broad areas as strategic leadership, organization management, administration, external and internal stakeholders, staff development and personnel. This paper describes the observational guide used in the English study and suggests that shadowing new heads can be a useful tool for learning about leadership, helping to increase our understanding of how time is used by principals and for what purpose. However, used on its own it has a number of limitations and these are noted.