High School Principals\u27 Instructional Leadership Practices to Reduce School Violence

With the constant increase of school violence, there is a need to prepare leaders how to best protect the school. However, high school principals may be inconsistently implementing instructional leadership practices that have been shown to reduce school violence. The purpose of this basic qualitative research design was to examine how high school principals were implementing instructional leadership practices to reduce school violence. The conceptual framework was Bandura\u27s social learning theory, which posits that people can learn by observing the behavior of others, and Hallinger\u27s and Murphy\u27s theory of instructional leadership regarding andragogy. A purposive sampling was used to select 10 high school principals for data collection via interviews. Data were analyzed using thematic analysis for emergent themes. The findings were that high school principals implement instructional leadership practices to reduce school violence through: (a) communication with teachers and students during school assemblies, staff meetings, classroom visits, and individually, (b) principals use but may need more professional development on strategies used to reduce violent incidents at school, and (c) principals would like more funding for professional resources such as manuals containing specific strategies to implement to reduce school violence. These findings support school principals to better apply their instructional leadership practices to reduce school violence. The implications for positive social change of this dissertation include strategies for high school principals to reduce school violence