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Eric Camburn

January 2009

Given the demands placed on school principals, it can be difficult for them to focus on one aspect of their work for very long. The job involves multiple, competing demands and responsibilities. Parent and teacher meetings, calls from the central office, and external mandates often require principals to allocate their time in fairly thin slices.

Some principals are generalists. They devote significant portions of time to all kinds of activities. Others choose to focus on one area—for example, instruction. Research by UW-Madison education professor Eric Camburn and colleagues found that a principal’s choice of focus depends primarily on the school context, to a lesser degree on personal attributes, and on the interaction between the two.

Camburn recently examined three aspects of principals’ priorities and practice:

• The way in which principals allocate their attention across major areas of responsibility;
• The extent to which principals emphasize different areas of responsibility in different contexts; and
• The extent to which personal, individual attributes affect how principals allocate their time and attention.

Camburn’s study revealed three kinds of principals: student leaders, who emphasize student affairs; instructional leaders, who focus on instructional leadership; and generalists, or eclectic leaders, who distribute their time evenly across responsibilities. Camburn says that, no matter the context, effective leaders match their practices and behaviors to their own environments. They anticipate and address these circumstances.

Camburn’s study found that contextual conditions distinguished among the three types of principals to a much greater extent than personal, individual characteristics. He used five measures to examine contextual conditions: the number of students in the school, the percentage of disadvantaged students, teachers’ average number of years teaching, the level of emphasis on academic excellence (academic press), and the level of student engagement.

The study found that eclectic principals differ significantly from those who have either a student or an instructional focus. Eclectic principals tend to operate in schools with higher academic press, higher student engagement, and lower percentages of disadvantaged students. They are most likely to work in elementary schools and medium-sized schools. Their freedom to spend time on varied activities and leadership responsibilities may reflect stable environments in their schools, Camburn says.