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Time demands faced by school principals make principals’ work increasingly difficult. Research outside education suggests that effective time management skills may help principals meet job demands, reduce job stress, and improve their performance. The purpose of this paper is to investigate these hypotheses.

The authors administered a time management inventory to nearly 300 principals in Miami-Dade County Public Schools, the fourth-largest school district in the USA. The authors analyzed scores on the inventory descriptively and used them to predict time-use data collected via in-person observations, a survey-based measure of job stress, and measures of perceived job effectiveness obtained from assistant principals and teachers in the school.

Principals with better time management skills allocate more time in classrooms and to managing instruction in their schools but spend less time on interpersonal relationship-building. Perhaps as a result of this tradeoff, the authors find that associations between principal time management skills and subjective assessments of principal performance are mixed. The authors find strong evidence, however, that time management skills are associated with lower principal job stress.

Findings suggest that building principals’ time management capacities may be a worthwhile strategy for increasing time on high-priority tasks and reducing stress.

This study is the first to empirically examine time management among school principals and link time management to key principal outcomes using large-scale data.

This paper aims to examine the key domains and prevailing trends in the context of teacher effectiveness while proposing directions for future research in this area.

Utilising the Science Citation Index Expanded and Social Sciences Citation Index databases within Scopus, covering the period from 2014 to 2024, a bibliometric review of 555 studies related to teacher effectiveness is conducted. This paper employs Bibliomagika 2.2, OpenRefine, R Output, IIPMaps and VOSviewer to screen, clean, analyse and report relevant and ethical data.

Based on the bibliometric analysis, we identified and revealed the subsequent publication trends, Lotka’s law and Price’s law authorship distribution patterns, the most active countries and thematic analysis of highly cited documents. We further integrate thematic analysis that emerged in highly cited documents with co-occurrence analyses of author keywords in the literature on teachers’ effectiveness research. However, the findings contradict the traditional distribution of Lotka’s law and Price’s law.

This finding has a notable limitation as it only covers 10 years of Scopus database data and predominantly focuses on English-language documents. Furthermore, this study does not thoroughly examine contextual factors influencing these trends, such as educational policy, technological progress and COVID-19 endemic repercussions. Finally, it should be emphasised that the analysis of trends extracted in Scopus cannot be generalised as the study relies heavily on citation metrics, which vary significantly across disciplines, leading to potential biases in evaluating teacher effectiveness studies, particularly those with an interdisciplinary nature.

This study provides readers with an in-depth analysis and understanding of the development of teacher effectiveness research with Lotka’s law and Price’s law. It also highlights recommendations for future research directions to ensure its sustainability, survival and expansion in the coming decades align with the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation's (UNESCO’s) Sustainable Development Goal 4 of quality education.

Despite increased focus on the importance of the time principals spend on instructional leadership, there is little research on practical ways to help principals manage their time to achieve this goal. The purpose of this paper is to examine the implementation of the school administration manager (SAM) process: a unique program designed to help principals orient their time toward instructional activities.

This mixed-methods study combines data from multiple sources including: case studies of four districts that involved interviews with principals and program staff in 16 schools; interviews with network-level staff and administrators; a survey of 387 principals and 378 program staff; and time use data collected by shadowers as well as a time-tracking calendar system for 373 principals.

Principals and their teams implemented the SAM process with relatively high fidelity. In addition, most participated in the program to increase time spent on instructional tasks. Indeed, principals’ time use shifted from managerial to instructional tasks as they implemented the program. However, there were important challenges related to the time and personnel resources required to implement the program as well as questions about the quality of the instructional leadership time spent.

This study describes not only time allocation, but also a process through which principals intentionally sought to shift their time toward instructional leadership activities. The insights gained from the implementation and outcomes of this process provide concrete direction for policymakers, practitioners and researchers looking for ways to change the time principals spend on instructional leadership.

What do principals look for when hiring teachers? The purpose of this paper is to extend the knowledge concerning what aspects of teacher quality are in demand among the individuals who administer schools and make hiring decisions.

Rather than employing interviews or surveys, the authors utilized a conjoint instrument that assembled teacher characteristics into fictitious applicant profiles. Participating North Carolina public school principals (n = 467) then chose among the computer-generated options and regression analysis allowed the authors to identify preferences in the aggregate.

Principals in this study preferred applicants with classroom experience, but those with 15 years were no more preferred than those with 5. They also preferred applicants with more education, but an advanced degree was no more preferred than a bachelor’s from a highly selective institution. Preference for teachers who are committed to state standards varied with schools’ performance on state tests.

Conjoint analysis is a useful tool for measuring preferences but is underutilized in research on education administration. This paper contributes not only to the body of knowledge about school principal behavior but also to the field’s familiarity of research techniques.

This chapter discusses the role of school leadership in the face of climate disasters and environmental injustices. These disruptions to schooling are emblematic of an increasing global uncertainty. School leaders play a pivotal role mitigating uncertainty following an environmental crisis or disaster through leadership activities that support their communities. However, preparing school leaders for unexpected disruptions to schooling has often been overlooked by preparation programs and professional development. The goal of this chapter is to equip school leaders with an essential understanding of both the influence of environmental injustice on schools and the tools to respond effectively to these events. First, the chapter contextualizes environmental injustice and inequality as a factor that influences school and student performance, especially for students living below the poverty line and students of color. Next, it synthesizes how school leaders have responded to prior instances of climate disasters and environmental injustices. Finally, it presents key considerations for school leaders confronting future occurrences.

The purpose of this paper is to replicate prior findings on teacher-principal race congruence and teacher job satisfaction and extend the literature by investigating trends over time and if the relationship between race congruence and teacher job satisfaction differs by principal race and region.

The study sample comes from four waves of cross-sectional data, the nationally representative Schools and Staffing Survey, administered between 2000 and 2012. The analysis is conducted using ordinary least squares and school-year fixed effects with a comprehensive set of covariates.

The relationship between race congruence and teacher job satisfaction is attenuating over time and is likely explained by the lower job satisfaction of white teachers who work for black principals. Some evidence indicates teacher-principal race congruence has greater salience in the Southern region of the country. Find evidence that teachers with race-congruent principals report more workplace support than their non-race congruent colleagues.

Future studies should investigate why racial congruence has more salience in the Southern region of the country and for white teachers who work with black principals. At the same time, results indicate that teacher-principal race congruence might no longer be a determinant of teacher job satisfaction, although further studies should continue investigating this relationship.

Findings on the changing nature of the relationship between principal-teacher race congruence and teacher job satisfaction over time as well as the differing nature of race congruence in the Southern region of the country are both novel findings in the literature.

The purpose of this paper is to compare the effects of two types of community-based, residential treatment programs among justice involved persons with dual diagnoses.

A randomized clinical trial examined treatment conditions among justice involved persons with substance use disorders who reported high baseline levels of psychiatric severity indicative of diagnosable psychiatric comorbidity. Participants (n=39) were randomly assigned to one of three treatment conditions upon discharge from inpatient treatment for substance use disorders: a professionally staffed, integrated residential treatment setting (therapeutic community), a self-run residential setting (Oxford House), or a treatment-specific aftercare referral (usual care). Levels of psychiatric severity, a global estimate of current psychopathological problem severity, were measured at two years as the outcome.

Participants randomly assigned to residential conditions reported significant reductions in psychiatric severity whereas those assigned to the usual care condition reported significant increases. There were no significant differences in psychiatric severity levels between residential conditions.

Findings suggest that cost-effective, self-run residential settings such as Oxford Houses provide benefits comparable to professionally run residential integrated treatments for justice involved persons who have dual diagnoses.

Results support the utilization of low-cost, community-based treatments for a highly marginalized population.

Little is known about residential treatments that reduce psychiatric severity for this population. Results extend the body of knowledge regarding the effects of community-based, residential integrated treatment and the Oxford House model.

As school districts evolve in their ability to actively support schools and educators, they must simultaneously contend with external policies that create additional demands on time and resources. This includes accountability policies aimed at increasing district and school capacity. This study uses Malen and Rice’s (2004) dual dimensions of capacity building to look at how district and charter leaders responded to the demands of Michigan’s Partnership Model, a district-based approach to school turnaround, focusing on how they tried to build capacity in response to the policy and whether and why these capacity building approaches were perceived as productive.

Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 22 out of 29 Partnership leaders between October 2019 to March 2020 in the second year of policy implementation. Data were analyzed using a combination of index-coding and thematic analysis.

Most leaders perceived the resources associated with the reform as useful, but the productivity of capacity building efforts was limited because some resources were not adequately matched to what they perceived as a core problem: the recruitment and retention of teachers. Engagement with the reform resulted in building informational and social capital because it fostered collaboration and continuous improvement processes, but leaders perceived technical partnerships as more productive than community partnerships.

Turnaround reforms like the Partnership Model that increase resources for districts and schools likely offer a better chance at success than those that simply focus on accountability threats without accompanying support because they give leaders new opportunities to coordinate and align resources, processes and ideas.

The purpose of this paper is to explore variation across principals in terms of the number and types of strategies they engage in to find teachers to fill the vacancies in their schools. The practices that the authors consider to be strategic are aligned with the district’s goals and objectives for teacher recruitment.

The authors selected 31 schools from the Chicago Public Schools system through a combination of stratified random sampling and purposive sampling. Through analysis of qualitative interviews with the 31 principals of these schools, the authors explore a range of principals’ hiring strategies and provide brief case examples to illuminate differences in hiring practices across principals.

The authors find that the majority of principals in the sample engage in relatively few of the practices considered strategic. Interestingly, sample principals who engaged in seven or more strategic practices were more likely to work in high schools than in elementary schools.

While the range of strategic hiring practices the authors explore provides a starting point for analyzing principals’ hiring practices, it is important to recognize that the list of strategies the authors consider is not exhaustive. For instance, the context of the study did not allow the authors to analyze practices such as the consideration of teacher value-added scores.

This study should be replicated in other contexts in order to see whether and how principals’ hiring practices vary by country, geographic location, urbanicity, and other factors.

This study is the first, to the authors’ knowledge, to detail principals’ hiring practices in relation to their district’s teacher recruitment plan with the aim of adding to the knowledge base on teacher hiring.

The purpose of this integrative literature review was three-fold: to explore the phenomenon of women’s career interruptions as revealed by publications in the past two decades, to propose a new career decision tree model (CDTM) and to outline an agenda for future research.

The authors adopted the integrative literature review approach proposed by Torraco (2005, 2016) and used a mind mapping application called MindMeister to synthesize 64 identified articles.

The proposed CDTM can assist those who are interested in exploring individuals’ career decisions to think systematically about career influencers at different levels.

The CDTM is significantly different from existing career models and theories in that it explains women’s career interruptions in a context-sensitive manner. This model can assist human resource development professionals in analyzing the influencers of women’s career decisions and tackling individual problems level by level.