The partnership will make three modifications to the survey to
tailor it to this specific project’s needs. First, the survey will be
specific to STEM by using the item stem ‘‘STEM leadership in this
school. . .’’. Second, this project emphasizes the distribution of
STEM leadership in its STEM transformation schools through the
appointment of a STEM Teacher on Special Assignment, therefore,
for the purposes of the survey STEM leadership will be defined
more broadly than the school’s administration. There is ample
support for the importance of broadening the definition of
leadership beyond school principals, especially when transformational
leadership is the desired leadership style (Leithwood et al.,
2008; NRC, 2011; Roberts, 1985). Finally, as a result of the
broadening of the definition of STEM leadership in this project, the
management-focused items on the school leadership survey will
be removed from the survey. These items appear to be particularly
tailored to administrator activities and are not closely aligned with
the partnership’s definition of transformational leadership. The
survey sub-scales are all reported to have satisfactory reliability
with alphas between 0.75 and 0.93 (Leithwood et al., 2006). As a
result of these reliability indices, it is expected that deleting the
management sub-scales will not be problematic; however, the
partnership will examine the psychometric properties of the
amended survey once applied to the STEM context.