Representing a Problem Space: Towards a Deeper Understanding of the Practice of Instructional Leadership
Understanding how principals solve the problems they encounter in practice is a critical step in improving instructional leadership in schools. Traditional approaches to extracting expertise in principals are sufficient to capture some differences in behavior and may hint at cognitive differences, but we argue that they do not tackle differences in the architecture of the problem space that principals construct when they are working on instructional problems. Drawing on a subset of data from a larger study of 40 principals, we present our visual approach to understanding how principals reason through problems. We conclude the paper with a discussion of how our approach could be used to better understand the practice of instructional leadership.