Connecting leadership, professional development and school improvement: A principal's journey at a modern Orthodox Jewish elementary school

The purpose of this 10-month inquiry was to describe and to document why and how one effective principal at a Modern Orthodox Jewish elementary school enacts her conceptions of leadership, professional development and school improvement in her day-to-day practices. In the world of Orthodox Jewish day schools where there is a shortage of principals qualified to be instructional leaders, this principal in this specific dual-curricular school context, overcomes fiscal and temporal barriers to on-going professional development and actively uses her instructional leadership to elevate teachers' practices during daily professional development in order to steadily maximize student learning. Her hands-on daily practices are significant because she chooses to create meaningful professional learning routines and adhere to state standards in a private school context where she is not bound to follow district mandates.;Qualitative methods, including informal and formal interviews with open-ended questions, a range of participant-observations and document analysis were used to collect data. On-going cross checking and member checking occurred to ensure trustworthiness of data. The social construction of knowledge and the conceptual framework of transformational leadership were drawn upon as theoretical guides to continuously and inductively analyze data.;Findings were consistent with literature that reveals that building professional learning communities strengthens teacher quality and provides an economical opportunity for on-going professional learning. Additionally, this particular warm learning community extends beyond the traditional school-based professional learning communities of principals, teachers and support staff to include active principal learning with parents at this school through monthly parent workshops. Findings also reveal that modeling, authentic assessment and building distributive leadership are venues to integrating instructional and transformational leadership. This inquiry has implications for private school principals to consider the notion of responsibilities before accountabilities and has specific implications for principals of Jewish day schools and other dual-curricular school settings to consider ensuring that consistent conceptions, expectations, scheduling and daily practices for professional development are in place when cultivating professional learning communities in both general and Judaic, or another area of, studies.