Understanding principal perceptions of leadership via the principalship

The role of the principal has been accentuated over the past decade. School principals are not only the facilitators of a school's instructional program, but they also make significant decisions that affect the school, accountable for the quality of their teachers' instruction, consistently working with school stakeholders, overseeing school learning environments, and more. Thus, the principalship was the area of focus in this study. The purpose of this study is to fill a gap in the literature and qualitatively investigate school leadership through the principalship by the perceptions of principals within Grey Valley Unified School District (GVUSD). This paper explores those perceptions specifically to help answer these two guiding questions: 1) What leadership dimensions do principals use to describe the principalship? 2) Why do principals find the identified leadership dimensions as relevant? Five focus groups from GVUSD were formed that consisted of twenty principal participants from elementary through high school. These principals shared examples of leadership encounters within the scope of the principalship to give context to this study. The conceptual framework that consisted of Skrla, McKenzie, and Scheurich (2009); Maxwell, Locke, and Scheurich (2013); and Guiton and Oakes (1995) served as the equity lens used to interpret the data. A qualitative approach (Creswell, 1998) guided the methods of research as it was used to obtain a complex, holistic picture of the occurrences being studied. The findings produced ten themes that revealed leadership dimensions of the principalship. These leadership dimensions create additional value to the knowledge base of school leadership as well as to new and existing principals. Data interpretation, Implications for practice, recommendations for GVUSD, and future research are provided at the close of this study.