DESCRIBING A PRINCIPAL'S WORK TOWARD RESILIENCY: THE NATURE OF MINDFUL LEADING

Thesis (Ph.D.), Department of Educational Leadership, Washington State UniversityHeightened accountability has amplified a need for principals to transform schools into resilient organizations capable of sustaining the organizational learning essential to increasing school reliability and subsequent student learning outcomes. Increased pressure to reform schools has many school leaders implementing professional development practices like data-driven inquiry that they believe may have the potential to remediate individual and systemic failures revealed through accountability efforts and ongoing data collection. A similar process of inquiry is found in high reliability organizations (HROs) that manage change and cultivate resilience through implementing a process for collective mindfulness. Improving organizational reliability and increasing resilience is of paramount importance to educational leadership in general, and in particular to building principals. Understanding how such strategies as data-driven dialogue align with and afford principals a tool for nurturing organizational mindfulness presents a significant problem of practice. To date, however, insufficient work has been done to analyze the effects of such practice, particularly at the middle school level. This study seeks to understand how organizational resilience is conceptualized and implemented in schools using strategies such as data-driven inquiry.Department of Educational Leadership, Washington State Universit