RUNNING HEAD: Principals and Professional Community The Role of Principals in Fostering Professional Community

This study uses the professional community as an organizing metaphor of schools and traces its relationship to principal leadership practices. It asks the following questions: (a) How does a principal create, foster, and support professional community? (b) How does leadership or existing organizational culture aid or impede attainment of school cultures that reflect the characteristics of professional community? (c) In what ways may the concept of professional community be further strengthened to enhance its usefulness to school leaders? The paper explores professional community and educational leadership in three interrelated ways: (1) it clarifies emerging concepts about, and relations between, leadership and professional communities within two urban high schools; (2) it critically juxtaposes these concepts and their relationship against recent literature; and (3) it uses a historical backdrop to determine where this exploration might go in the future. The moral here is that school metaphors (the way we "do " school) and how we structure the relationships and ideas of our lives are all interrelated. (Contains 42 references.) (DFR) Reproductions supplied by EDRS are the best that can be made from the original document