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Dr Scott EacottOffice of Educational Leadership

School of EducationThe University of New South Wales

Theoretical notes on a relational approach to principals’ time use

Scott Eacott

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Introduction• A temporal turn in the social sciences

• Taylorism | Fordist models of management

• Beyond substantialist to relational

OUR RELATIONS WITH TIME

Ontological complicity

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Eacott (2013)What we have come to know as the school and the administration of schooling is constituted through the operationalization and privileging of clock time. The temporal rules of schooling construct the school day, terms, semesters, the school year, class schedules and the notion of progression based on time. (p.96)

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My intervention

• The current problems with principals’ time use concern a crisis of temporality

• The relational research program provides the resources to help us understand this crisis of temporality

FROM TIME TO TEMPORALITY

Problematizing foundations

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Grissom, Loeb & Matini (2015)… principals must make decisions about how to allocate their time among competing job demands. These time-use decisions are important for effective leadership, as evidenced by the relationship between principal time use and school outcomes (e.g., Grissom et al., 2013; Horng et al., 2010). (p. 774)

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SPATIO-TEMPORAL CONDITIONS

Locating trajectories

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Grissom, Loeb & Master (2013)The time-use and survey measures that we may use indicate that the allocation of principal instructional time matters, but it is possible that these measures are proxies for the skills and behaviors that different principals bring to the tale when trying to support teachers instructionally. It may be these differences in skills and not the time use that actually cause the school outcomes observed. (p. 442)

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Re-thinking “context”1. Context (social structure) → practice

2. Practice (agency) → context (social structures)

3. Practice (agency) ↔ context (social structures)

4. Context (social structures) → (+/-) practice (agency) → transformed or reproduced

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To overcome the epistemic imperialism of a Western version of temporality, a cross-national exploration of principals’ time use would need to balance the particular experiences of the temporal without assuming one version and a consistency in data generation.

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Conclusion• An absence of theoretical crisis

• Embrace the temporal

• An alternative to clock time

• Privilege how principals experience the temporal

Dialogue and Debate

Paper presented to:

AERA Funded ConferenceCross-national explorations of principals’ time use: patterns, causes and effects

Ann Harding Conference CentreUniversity of CanberraACT AUSTRALIA01 August 2016

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Contact Details

Dr Scott EacottPhD MLMEd GradCertPTT BTeach/BSocSci FACEL

Director, Office of Educational LeadershipSchool of EducationUniversity of New South WalesSydney NSW AUSTRALIA 2052

P: +61 2 9385 0704T: @ScottEacottE: s.eacott@unsw.edu.auW: http://scotteacott.com

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