PRINCIPALS AS INSTRUCTIONAL LEADERS
The National Association for Elementary School Principals' (2001) report, Leading Learning Communities: Standards for What Principals Should Know and Be Able to Do, advocates that principals provide time for teacher reflection on their own practice; invest in teacher learning; connect professional development to school learning goals; provide op- portunities for teachers to work, plan, and think together; and recognize the need to continu- ally improve their own professional practice.
Richard Elmore (2000) offers a definition of school leadership comparable to Roland Barth's in its brevity: "Leadership is the guidance and direction of instructional improve- ment" (p. 13). One of the most important instructionally-focused areas for school leaders, according to Elmore (2000), is helping others acquire new values and behaviors. Sounding a bit like Linda Lambert in Chapter 8, Elmore writes: "People make these fundamental transitions, by having many opportunities to be exposed to the ideas, to argue them into their own normative belief systems, to practice the behaviors that go with these values, to