Systemwide Support for Stronger Instruction

In 2024, we set out to understand the challenges of defining instructional leadership, particularly when it comes to principals’ role in supporting teaching and learning. Our extensive review of existing research and practitioner interviews surfaced a sector-wide lack of clarity about what “instructional leadership” means in practice and who should be responsible for it.

Read the executive summary from the first Principal Role Clarity paper.

This lack of clarity creates daily friction for principals, teachers, and students. Effective instruction depends on teachers receiving consistent, high-quality support—and that depends on whether principals have the guidance and resources they need to lead. 

To address this challenge, system leaders need clearer examples and guidance for how instructional leadership can be intentionally defined, distributed, and supported across schools.

Learning from examples of clear and effective instructional leadership

There’s no single model for organizing​​ instructional leadership that will work in every context, but we observed some important commonalities in the approaches of the four high-performing systems we studied. 

Together, the examples in this paper offer practical entry points for school system leaders—presenting different ways to organize people, time, and resources toward a shared vision for instructional leadership.

Download the paper to learn from:

1. Insights into how high-performing school systems define and organize instructional leadership activities
2. A detailed account of how we partnered with a district to implement clear expectations for leaders and coherent support for teachers
3. Five practical actions school system leaders can take to define expectations, align support, and sustain instructional leadership

Complete the form below to access the full paper.